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This article is more than 1 year old

Great news! Only 707,509,815 records breached in 2015

Things were worse in 2014, but governments are trying to drag us down with sloppy security

More than 700 million records were breached last year, according to security researchers at Gemalto.

The firm's 2015 Breach Level report considered 1673 hacking incidents recorded during 2015, of which 964 were thanks to outsides and a whopping 398 thanks to bumbling staff and developers.

Those figures are surprisingly smaller than 2014 with total pwnage falling by 39 percent and breach incidents by 3.4 percent, according to the company's 2014 report.

Still, the figures equate to nearly two million lost or stolen records a day.

Giant breaches including the Turkish Citizenship agency, Korea Pharmaceutical Information Center, and the Office of Personnel Management contributed a respective 50 million, 43 million, and 22 million records a piece, and making government the most prolific of leak sectors.

Nation states were responsible for a total of 307 million breached records, ahead of healthcare with 84 million data sets compromised. Of this the Anthem breach contributed an eye-watering 78.8 million breached records.

The United States remains as usual the largest target for attacks with some 1222 breaches recorded by the company. The UK comes in second with a measly 154 breaches, Canada with 59 incidents, and Australia with a paltry 42 publicly-recorded hacks and gaffes.

The United Kingdom dominates the Europe wall of shame list with Germany in second spot sporting only 11 known breaches.

Australia leads the Asia Pacific in the number of public breaches with New Zealand in second spot at 22 breaches last year.

Gemalto says in its report [PDF] the figures are gathered from public sources across the web much like the pwned-password databases of record that have risen in recent years. ®

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