Last year is widely regarded as a milestone period for data breached, and not in a good way. Just how bad was it?

Pretty bad. A new study finds the year suffered the highest number of data breaches on record, breaking the previous record set in 2013. The study from Risk Based Security Inc. found that in 2016, there were 4,149 data breaches that exposed more than 4.2 billion files, with an average theft rate per data breach of 1.012 million data records.

Skewing the overall numbers were the high-profile data breaches of FriendFinder Networks, Myspace and Yahoo, which combined accounted for more than 2.2 billion records compromised. Some 94 of the breaches recorded in the year exposed a million or more records. A little over half exposed fewer than 10,000 records.

Businesses accounted for 55 percent of all hacks. Only 18 percent of data breaches were found to be the result of insider activity, with hacking being the most common form of access. SQL injections — according to Wikipedia, nefarious database entries that instruct the system, for instance, to dump the database contents to the attacker — remained the most popular method used by hackers. Stolen laptops, claimed to have been previously a popular method for obtaining data from a targeted network, accounted for only 1.6 percent of data breaches during the year.

The United States and the United Kingdom led the list of countries by number of data breaches, reporting 1,971 and 204 incidents, respectively.

“There have been numerous sources discussing data breach statistics recently, however, their reported numbers are either not accurate or missing information when compared to our dataset,” Risk Based Security Executive Vice President Inga Goddijn said in a statement. “While the number of data breaches actually remained relatively flat from last year, the big story coming out of 2016 is obviously the massive increase in the number of records exposed.”

Image: 143601516@N03/Flickr/CC by 2.0