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Data Theft Hit Over 1 Million Massachusetts Residents In 2013

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A record number of Massachusetts residents were victims of personal data thefts last year, according to a new state report issued Thursday.

Data breaches affected 1.2 million Massachusetts residents—nearly 20 percent of the state’s population—last year, according to the annual report from the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs. The state’s consumer secretary, Barbara Anthony, said most of the breaches were the result of the massive data theft from Target stores.

  " We had 900,000 Massachusetts resident affected by that one breach."

Although Target’s security breach affected the most people, retailers accounted for just 24 of the 1,821 incidents reported to the state.  Eight-five percent of the security breaches hit the financial services industry.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.