There is no shortage of attention in the media to data breaches affecting consumers in the United States—so called “business to consumer,” or “B2C” data breaches. And rightfully so—the Identity Theft Resource Center, which has been tracking data breaches in the United States since 2005, released a report in January 2015 which showed that U.S. B2C data breaches hit a record high of 783 in 2014.1 This number represents an increase of 27.5 percent over similar breaches reported in 2013, and pushes the total number of U.S. data breach incidents tracked since 2005 to 5,029 reported incidents involving over 675 million estimated records.2
For example, in January 2014, Target revealed that it had been the victim of a computer hack through which the contact information of 70 million individuals and information relating to 40 million credit and debit card accounts were stolen.3 In early 2015, Anthem announced that a cyberattack had compromised the personal information of almost 80 million individuals, including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health care ID numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and employment information.4
