GOLDEN STATE WINS GOLD

California has suffered more data breaches and personal records exposed than any other state in the U.S. over the past decade, with almost 1,500 data breach incidents, a new report has found.

The report, published Thursday by consumer group Comparitech, found that data breach incidents in California led to 5.6 billion personal records being exposed. Oregon came second on the number of records exposed at around 1.3 billion, while New York ranked second on the number of data breaches, at 729.

Comparitech used information on data breaches collected by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Identity Theft Resource Center to examine the number of breaches in each state between 2008 and 2019.

The number of breaches and personal information exposed were assigned to the states where the breach occurred, though for some breaches that were more widespread, the numbers were assigned to the state where the headquarters of the company breached was located at the time.

Comparitech estimated that in total since 2008, there have been almost 10,000 data breaches in the U.S., exposing around 10.7 billion personal records. The group said IT amounts to around $1.6 trillion lost in the past decade.