Summary:  In 1748, in response to the request of a friend, Benjamin Franklin offered the following hints in his pamphlet, Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One: "Remember that time is money. Remember that credit is money." In a patchwork landscape of data breach notification laws, these words have never been so true for American companies preparing for and responding to data breaches.

The Identity Theft Resource Center® (ITRC), is a nationally recognized nonprofit organization established to support victims of identity crime. According to the ITRC, 92 million records were exposed from 619 data breaches in 2013 when we first addressed this issue. By 2017 that number had increased to 197 million records exposed, with 1,579 from data breaches. In 2018, ITRC tracked an extreme jump at 126 percent in the number of consumer records exposed (446.5 million) from data breaches. The most recent update of statistics from the ITRC tracked records for data breaches was for the third quarter 2020 which revealed a 30 percent drop in number (846 breaches) year over year compared to 2019 (1,190 breaches).

In 2018, the majority of exposed records came from the business sector, but with the lowest rate of exposure per breach; while the healthcare field had  the second largest number of breaches and the highest rate of exposure per breach. While the business sector remained in lead position in number of breaches (644) and exposed records in 2019, the financial sector way surpassed both the business sector and the medical/healthcare field in the number of sensitive records exposed at 100.6 million, with just 108 breaches, compared to 644 breaches in the business sector and 525 in the medical/healthcare field. While the business sector had a record number of exposed records, 99.99 percent of those exposed were of non-sensitive nature. In fact, the reduction in the number of exposed sensitive and nonsensitive records from 2018 to 2019 is staggering, dropping from 438.9 million sensitive and 1 billion 570.6 million nonsensitive records in 2018 to 18.8 million sensitive, 705.1 million nonsensitive exposed records in 2019.