Data Loss Across Countries and Industries

The U.S is the undeniable global center of technology. It has the top startup cities and some of the most impactful companies. Yet the U.S also has the most data losses, by far. In fact the United States alone accounts for 64% of all data losses in the world. There are roughly 6.2 billion data records stolen or lost in the U.S from 2013 to 2020. For comparison, in China there were 350 million.

In terms of where this data is being lost, there is a lot of variance. Yet the undeniable king is within the field of finance. For example in Ukraine, 100 GB of data was stolen in 2018 from a loan provider. Clearly, there’s an obvious incentive to attack finance, yet interestingly the next biggest field is healthcare. A historically large breach here was when an insurance company forwarded patient information to a vendor.

Of course though data loss can occur anywhere and within any industry. Toyota for example lost hundreds of thousands of customers’ data to hackers. Yet for the most part data breaches aren’t as malicious. The most common causes in fact are human error and unexpected failures alongside the more expected malware.

Data loss has been occurring since the start of time, imagine a library burning for a historical example. So today, with more information than ever, the rate at which data is created and lost is tremendous. There are strides made to reduce this effect, but ultimately as long as data is being stored there is data to be lost.