Security News > 2020 > July > US schools have lost 24.5 million records in breaches since 2005
A report from Comparitech has looked into cyberattacks on educational institutions in the United States, finding that there have been more than 1,300 breaches since 2005 and more than 24 million records lost.
California remains a hotspot, according to the report, "Yet Arizona becomes one of the worst-hit states with only slightly fewer people affected in its breaches than California. West Virginia and Georgia also display high numbers of records affected in contrast to the number of breaches with 1.3 million and 1.6 million records impacted, respectively. Other states with high numbers of records exposed or stolen in breaches include Ohio, Massachusetts, and Florida."
Texas, California, Illinois, New York and Florida had the highest number of breaches at K-12 schools from 2005 to 2020 but some states, like Nevada, still had large numbers of records lost despite low amounts of breaches.
Cook also breaks the numbers down by records lost per breach, finding that public K-12 schools lost 8,847 records per breach while public colleges or universities lost 25,312 records per breach.
The biggest breaches since 2005 were the 2013 Maricopa County Community College District Data Breach, which resulted in 2.49 million records lost and the 2017 Harvard Computer Society breach involving 1.4 million lost records.