US Cyber Security: 164 Million Records Exposed in 2019

Data breaches are increasing rapidly, posing a severe security threat to the growth of businesses across the world.

With this, maintaining a robust IT security posture has become a need of the hour for companies.

Do you know? The global spending on information security (under the worldwide cybersecurity market) products and services have increased to USD 114.8 billion, as of 2018.

According to Gartner, the number is expected to rise further to USD 170.4 billion by 2022.

Overall, the cybersecurity spending during the 2017-22 period is estimated to touch the USD 1 trillion mark.

Looking at the distribution of global data breaches in the 1st half of 2018, malicious outsider topped the list with involvement in 56 percent of breaches.

Accidental loss accounted for 24 percent of breaches.

While malicious insiders held 7 percent share, followed by Hacktivist (2 percent) and unknown attackers (1 percent).


The US companies faced many cyberattacks annually during the 2013-19 period, with 1,473 annual data breach incidents and 164.68 million records exposed in 2019 alone.

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Data breaches exposed in the United States from 2005 to 2019
Source: Statista

However, that was lower compared to 2017, where the country saw 1,257 incidents and 471 records exposed.

  • Business and healthcare reported majority incidents calculated as 644 and 525 breaches, respectively
  • Education (113), Banking/Credit/Financial (108) and Government/Military (83) are among other sectors
  • Medical and education sectors reported a two-fold rise in the number of data breaches at the end of the 6-year review period

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In the business sector, the number of data breaches increased from 194 at the start of review period (2013) to 644 in period (2019). The government sector reported a little rise in the number of data breach incidents, from 60 in 2013 to 83 in 2019.

Overall, more than 11,000 data breach incidents took place in the US in 14 years period from 2005 to 2019, exposing more than 1.8 million records.

Interesting News: 64% Americans Don’t Have Data Breach Response Plan

The highest number of data breach incidents were recorded in 2017 at 1,473, while 2018 had more exposed records at 471.2 million.

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