Mar 20 2024

Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks in the USA in February 2024 – 621,095,066 Records Breached

Category: Data Breach — disc7 @ 7:16 am
https://www.itgovernanceusa.com/blog/data-breaches-and-cyber-attacks-in-the-usa-in-february-2024-621095066-records-breached?

Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks in the USA in February 2024 – 621,095,066 Records Breached

 Kyna Kosling  March 14, 2024

IT Governance USA’s research found the following for February 2024:

  • 322 publicly disclosed security incidents (45% of all incidents globally)
  • 621,095,066 records known to be breached

This month, globally, 719,366,482 records were known to be breached – 86% of them were in the USA.

This is unusual. Typically, the USA suffers more incidents than any other country, but these tend to lead to a disproportionately low number of records breached.

This month is different due to two outlier breaches:

  1. Zenlayer’s publicly exposed database, which contained 384,658,212 records
  2. Pure Incubation Ventures, which allegedly* had 183,754,481 records go up for sale

*The threat actor provided 100,000 records as a sample.

Free PDF download: Data Breach Dashboard

For a quick, one-page overview of this month’s findings, please use our Data Breach Dashboard:

Data Breaches and Cyber Attacks in the USA in February 2024 – 621,095,066 Records Breached

 Kyna Kosling  March 14, 2024

IT Governance USA’s research found the following for February 2024:

  • 322 publicly disclosed security incidents (45% of all incidents globally)
  • 621,095,066 records known to be breached

This month, globally, 719,366,482 records were known to be breached – 86% of them were in the USA.

This is unusual. Typically, the USA suffers more incidents than any other country, but these tend to lead to a disproportionately low number of records breached.

This month is different due to two outlier breaches:

  1. Zenlayer’s publicly exposed database, which contained 384,658,212 records
  2. Pure Incubation Ventures, which allegedly* had 183,754,481 records go up for sale

*The threat actor provided 100,000 records as a sample.

Free PDF download: Data Breach Dashboard

For a quick, one-page overview of this month’s findings, please use our Data Breach Dashboard:

You can also download this and previous months’ Dashboards as free PDFs here.

This blog provides further analysis of the data we’ve collected. We also provide an annual overview and analyze the longer-term trends in our 2024 overview of publicly disclosed data breaches and cyber attacks in the USA.

You can learn more about our research methodology here.

Note 1: Where ‘around,’ ‘about,’ etc. is reported, we record the rounded number. Where ‘more than,’ ‘at least,’ etc. is reported, we record the rounded number plus one. Where ‘up to,’ etc. is reported, we record the rounded number minus one.

Note 2: For incidents where we only know the file size of the data breached, we use the formula 1 MB = 1 record. Given that we can’t know the exact numbers, as it depends on the types of records included (e.g. pictures and medical histories are considerably larger files than just names and addresses), we err on the side of caution by using this formula. We believe that this underestimates the records breached in most cases, but it is more accurate than not providing a number at all.

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Tags: Cyber Attacks in the USA