The number of data breaches being reported in the U.S. and elsewhere each year continues to decline. But security experts say this unfortunately can be explained by criminals increasingly focusing on lucrative ransomware and business email compromise scams, which require scant data to be successful.
In the U.S., reported data breaches and inadvertent data exposure incidents decreased by 19% from 1,473 in 2019 to 1,108 in 2020, as did the overall number of exposed records, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit organization based in San Diego, California, that provides no-cost assistance to U.S. identity theft victims to help resolve their cases. The ITRC recently released its 15th annual Data Breach Report.
