Year in review
Top 10 data breaches
The ten loudest data breaches of the last twelve months, ranked by the scale of the case rather than the publication date.
The ranking is built automatically from the news digest archive. Every entry gets a score computed from its title and summary: what counts is the wording of the breach itself, a trace of personal data, and a scale stated outright — the number of records, people or terabytes. The title weighs three times more than the summary, because that is where newsrooms put the point.
The same case covered by several outlets counts once — the ranking compares titles and keeps the higher-scoring one. It is recalculated on every feed refresh, so it grows along with the archive and needs no manual updates.
What is not here: cases that never reached any of the tracked sources, and breaches reported without a stated scale — without a number in the title an entry rarely clears the threshold. This is a review of press coverage, not an incident register.
The sector is recognised from the title and summary, so some entries fall into none — those appear only in the overall ranking.
Refreshed: 18.10.2026, 20:03