Journal 3:Social Science and data breaches

Journal 3

Gary Hensley

06/06/2026

The Privacy Rights  Clearinghouse website is a source of information about data breaches. The reports provided who was breached and how it occurred (PrivacyRights Clearinghouse, 2026). Reports are able to tell what data was breached and the type of breach, with the location of the most affected areas. Reports can be a great tool for cybersecurity studies, allowing one to see past and current trends.

In the social sciences, many branches can benefit from a site that provides this information. Having access to reports all around the world showing the biggest targeted companies or information. Some of the branches that would like this data would be political science, criminology, economics, and sociology.  Knowing how attacks happen, whether it was ransomware, phishing, or malware, shows the cyber world what might be the weak points. A study can be done by the reports of attacks on companies where the breach was from an email opened by an employee.  We could look at why people made these attacks based on the information stolen. Criminology can look at the areas where attacks are coming from and why most of the attacks originate from these areas.

The ability to look at reports from past years allows us to build a pattern of how attacks happened and what information was taken. Being able to study past events allows to build a study without having to start from the beginning and possibly wait years for the experiment to finish.

References

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. (2026). Data breaches. https://privacyrights.org/data-breaches