The year 2021 saw consumers becoming accustomed to shopping, dining, traveling, learning, and caring for their health in an ever-more-digital fashion. Unfortunately, the personal data driving these experiences was put at greater risk than ever by a perfected loop of using previously breached data to drive new breaches and widen their impact.

This report is based on data from a variety of sources. Principal among them is the 2021 Identity Theft Resource Center, with data on several thousand breaches, and the IBM Ponemon report on the cost of data breaches. Additional research into the largest breaches of 2021 included TechCrunch and Forrester Research, as well as UpGuard and IdentityForce. This research yielded up-to-date information on the attack vectors, number of records impacted, and industries most affected.