All datasets › Crime
Data Breaches in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of data breach news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about a data breach or data leak, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, data breaches took a 42% smaller share of news coverage in 2020 than in 2019 (1.99 against 3.43 articles per 10,000 news articles), and by 2024 their share (2.98 per 10,000) had recovered to 1.5 times the 2020 level without regaining the 2019 level.
Basis: Annual data breach articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
July 2019, the month in which Capital One disclosed its data breach, was the month in which data breaches took their largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 7.04 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly data breach articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
July 2024, the month in which AT&T disclosed the theft of customer call records, had the second-largest monthly share of global news taken by data breaches between January 2019 and July 2026 (5.25 articles per 10,000 news articles), and the largest number of data breach articles of any month (1,027).
Basis: Monthly counts and shares of 38,972 matched articles.
Of data breach articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 78.5% were negative in tone, 2.34 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.9% of sampled articles carry a label.
A machine-assigned editorial priority rating placed 86% of data breach articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 2.02 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 4,782 | 49.23% | 1.02 |
| United Kingdom | 1,021 | 10.51% | 1.8 |
| India | 663 | 6.83% | 0.52 |
| Australia | 490 | 5.04% | 2.35 |
| South Korea | 278 | 2.86% | 4.77 |
| China | 268 | 2.76% | 1.05 |
| Singapore | 182 | 1.87% | 2.1 |
| Canada | 171 | 1.76% | 0.82 |
| France | 113 | 1.16% | 0.59 |
| Japan | 112 | 1.15% | 1.09 |
| Brazil | 104 | 1.07% | 1.24 |
| Nigeria | 103 | 1.06% | 0.77 |
| New Zealand | 103 | 1.06% | 1.64 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "data breach" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Data Breaches in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/data-breach/