There were 6,515 publicly disclosed data compromise events through December 31, 2018, exposing over 5 billion sensitive records, according to Risk Based Security’s Year End 2018 Data Breach QuickView Report.

While the year ended below 2017’s high mark of 6,728 reported breaches, a slow trickle of new breach information continues and may end up placing 2018 in the top spot.

“It’s been an unusual year for breach activity,” commented Inga Goddijn, Executive Vice President of Risk Based Security. “We’ve been monitoring breach events for more than a dozen years now and this is the first time we’ve observed a slow start to the year following by a growing number of disclosures as the months pass. We suspect various factors including the allure of crypto mining had an impact on breach activity early in the year, but disclosures rebounded throughout the summer and into the last quarter.”