More than 1 billion impacted by data breaches in first half of 2024
Industries that experienced the highest number of compromises include financial services and health care.
There were 1,571 data compromises impacting approximately 1.07 billion people in the first half of 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports.
This is a 14% increase compared to the first half of a record-setting 2023, which saw 3,203 compromises for the whole year. ITRC’s data shows that prior to 2023, the highest number of data compromises in an entire year was 1,860 (2021), which demonstrates the exponential growth in these kinds of attacks.
In the second quarter of 2024, there were a total of 732 reported compromises, including 653 data breaches, 4 data exposures and 75 unknown compromises, with these events affecting a total of 1.04 billion victims.
ITRC reports the compromises in Q2 with the largest number of victims included attacks on:
- Ticketmaster Entertainment, LLC: 560 million victims
- Advance Auto Parts, Inc.: 380 million victims
- Dell Technologies, Inc.: 49 million victims
- Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc.: 13.4 million victims
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: 8.46 million victims
The industries that experienced the highest number of compromises in the first half of 2024 were:
- Financial services (407);
- Health care (236);
- Professional services (178);
- Manufacturing (151); and
- Education (76).
These breaches included cyberattacks (1,226 breaches), system and human errors (155 breaches/exposures), physical attacks (18 breaches/exposures) and supply chain attacks (80 breaches/exposures). ITRC does note, however, that supply chain attacks in H1 2024 did drop slightly compared to the same period in 2023, but the number of entities that were compromised in those attacks increased.
The first half of the year also revealed an increase in the use of stolen driver’s license information, which was pilfered in 25% of data breaches. ITRC attributes this jump in licensing data theft to a “post-pandemic trend related to the increased use of Driver’s Licenses for identity verification in a wider variety of transactions.” In 2019 – the last full, pre-pandemic year – there were 198 instances of driver’s licenses data being stolen. In 2023, that number had climbed to 636 for the year, and there have been 636 instances in 2024, as of June 30.
The biggest targets for driver’s license data compromises in the first half of 2024 were financial services, health care, professional services, manufacturing and government.