Washington State Data Breach Notifications and Lifecycle Statistics

Washington State law mandates entities report data breaches affecting over 500 residents to the Attorney General's Office. This dataset contains derived statistics from those notifications, including breach causes, affected population counts, and detailed timelines of the breach lifecycle. It serves as the source data for the AGO's Annual Data Breach Report.

Use Cases

• Analyzing breach containment efficiency using DaysToContainBreach and DaysBreachLifecycle
• Correlating breach causes with industry sectors using DataBreachCause and IndustryType
• Tracking annual trends in breach scale using Year and WashingtoniansAffected
• Investigating discovery and notification delays using DaysElapsedBetweenEndAndDiscovery and DaysElapsedBeforeNotification
• Profiling attack methods by business type using CyberattackType and BusinessType

Strengths

• Dataset is the official source for the Washington Attorney General's Annual Data Breach Report
• Contains detailed temporal columns for analyzing the full breach lifecycle
• Cross-platform presence on Socrata and Data.gov signals its importance and official status

Limitations

• Critical metadata like row count, license, and author are missing or conflicting across sources
• Scope is limited to breaches affecting more than 500 Washington residents, excluding smaller incidents
• Data freshness is unclear; last update dates are provided but the actual data time range is not specified

Provenance

Source

Washington State Attorney General's Office (AGO)

Collection Method

Statistics derived from mandatory breach notifications submitted to the AGO under state law

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-04-05 according to Data.gov

Geography

Washington State, United States