Healthcare data breaches were the most common type of data security incident reported in 2015, according to a recent study by Symantec Corporation.
Researchers found that approximately 39 percent of breaches during the year occurred in the health services sub-sector.
“This comes as no surprise, given the strict rules within the healthcare industry regarding reporting of data breaches,” explained the authors of the study. “However, the number of identities exposed is relatively small in this industry. Such a high number of breaches with low numbers of identities tends to show that the data itself is quite valuable to warrant so many small breaches.”
There were 120 healthcare data breaches reported in 2015, which was the largest number of data breaches across all industries studied. The next leading industries for data breaches (business and education) only reported 20 incidents each.
