Protenus’s 2020 BreachBarometer is now available for free downloading. From their highlights:
Our analysis is based on 572 health data breaches reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the media, or some other source during 2019 (Figure 1). As in years past, we do not have numbers for every incident in 2019, but for those 481 incidents for which we have data, 41,404,022 patients were impacted. This number is likely to be a huge underestimate, as two of the incidents for which there was no data affected 500 dental practices and clinics and could affect significant volumes of patient records. Comparing these numbers with those of last year, we saw an increase in the number of breaches reported (503 in 2018 compared to 572 in 2019), and a staggering increase in the number of affected patient records (Figure 2). In 2019, the total number of affected patient records almost tripled when compared to 2018 data (i.e., 15,085,302 affected patient records).
Disclosure: DataBreaches.net provides data and preliminary analyses to Protenus for their reports. Because our method of scoring/categorizing breaches is different than HHS’s or Verizon DBIR, readers should consider that there are methodological differences among the different reports that may lead to different conclusions or interpretations. Request the report from Protenus here.