The ITRC has released its 2025 Annual Data Breach Report, which shows a 79 percent jump in data compromises over five years!
According to the 2025 Annual Data Breach Report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) (available for download here), the number of data compromises in 2025 (3,322) increased by five percentage points compared to 2024 (3,152). That’s up four percentage points from the previous all-time high in 2023 (3,202). It is also a 79 percent jump over five years.
Here’s some good news. The number of victim notices (278,827,933) decreased by 79 percentage points from 2024 (1,367,117,021). The massive decrease in victim notices is due to the lack of “mega-breaches” in 2025, unlike 2024. It is the lowest number of victim notices since 2014 and the lowest number since the last U.S. state and territories adopted data breach laws in 2018.
Other findings in the 2025 Annual Data Breach Report include:
- 70 percent (2,324) of data breach notices did not include attack information, compared to 65 percent (2,049) in 2024 and 45 percent (1,449) in 2023. In 2020, nearly every organization that suffered a breach provided clear details on how it happened. This trend has worsened every year since 2020,
- The Financial Services industry was the most breached industry (739 compromises), followed by Healthcare (534 compromises), Professional Services (478 compromises), Manufacturing (299 compromises) and Education (188 compromises).
- Eighty-eight (88) percent of people who received a data breach notice experienced at least one negative consequence after a breach, including an increase in “phishing” or scam attempts (40 percent), an increase in spam emails or robocalls (49 percent) and attempted takeover of an existing account (40 percent).
- The impact of data breaches is significant, causing immediate anxiety (60 percent) and frustration (59 percent). The primary fear is immediate financial fraud (50 percent), a well-founded concern, as 54 percent of consumers reported an increase in targeted phishing attempts after a breach.
The 63-page PDF 2025 Annual Data Breach Report is chock-full of graphics, statistics, term definitions and more which makes it a very easy read. Check it out here!
So, what do you think? Are you surprised that ITRC is reporting a 79 percent jump in data compromises over five years? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robots finding out their data has been breached”.
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