Data Breach Statistics
Data Breach by Industry
Latest Statistics
In the past 12 months, 27% of organizations reported data breaches tied to AI use.
Sensitive information disclosure ranks as the second biggest LLM threat for a second consecutive year.
11% of reported cybercrime cases in Africa in 2025 involved data breaches.
AI-enabled malicious breaches increased by 56% over the previous year.
Financial services breaches cost on average $6.3 million.
73% of organizations have found their workforce’s credentials in breach, Dark Web, or infostealer data in the past year
Nearly 693,000 records are known to have been breached in the confirmed education-sector ransomware attacks in H1 2026.
Only 24% of H1 2026 breach notices contained attack-vector details, the lowest rate ever recorded by the ITRC.
A single Canvas data compromise generated an estimated 275 million victim notices, accounting for 58% of the H1 2026 total.
Financial services recorded the highest frequency of compromises by sector at 387.
77% of enterprises are concerned about data breaches or theft in non-production environments.
68% of enterprises are concerned about data leaks in AI workflows.
Stealer log exposure increased 175% in a before-and-after security posture comparison.
34% of enterprise leaders report their organizations have experienced data breaches or theft.
Deadlock was absent from public data-leak sites for 11 months before emerging publicly.
Confirmed ransomware attacks on government entities involved 179,000 known breached records in H1 2026.
The City of Suffolk, Virginia breach affected 157,725 people in February 2026.
İzelman A.Ş. (İzmir municipal parking service) reports that 10,000 people may have been impacted in its March 2026 breach.
The US absorbed 1,094 ransomware victim data leak posts in Q2, roughly 49% of observed activity and nine times the volume of the next country.
100% of executives have breach data linking their name to at least one current email address.
94% of executives have at least one plaintext password exposed in breach data.
40% of quick service and fast casual restaurant chains had payment card data leaked in the past 12 months.
32% of quick service and fast casual restaurant chains had customer personal information leaked in the past 12 months.
30% of quick service and fast casual restaurant chains had internal system credentials leaked in the past 12 months.
28% of the top 100 vendors most commonly used by universities have experienced a data breach since 2024.
55.2% of IT and security professionals who experienced a security incident or breach in the past 12 months state they were told to keep it confidential despite believing it should have been reported.
The 55.2% of IT and security professionals told to keep breaches confidential is slightly down from 57.6% in 2025 and substantially higher than 42% in 2023.
68.6% of IT and security professionals in the U.S. who experienced a breach report being told to keep it confidential, the highest regional rate.
Cyber is the leading cause of both IT downtime and data loss for the fourth consecutive year.
43% of large organisations reported losing data as a result of a cyber attack.
31% of healthcare practices are still running on legacy systems that cannot contain a breach quickly once it starts.
58% of UK organizations cite preventing data breaches as the primary reason for data sovereignty efforts.
Among organizations where AI significantly expanded identities requiring access, breach rates reached 43% over the past twelve months. In contrast, where AI had not materially changed access patterns, breach rates were 11% over the past twelve months.
Organizations with 500 to 999 employees reported a 40.3% breach rate, the highest of any size segment.
In North America, 24% of breached organizations reported losses of at least $100,000 in the past year.
63% of organizations have investigated severe data leaks within the past 12 months where generative AI tools were a definitive contributing factor.
93% of organizations acknowledge a recent breach tied to their own applications.
31% of breaches now start with software vulnerabilities.
48% of all breaches now involve ransomware.