A dataset for accounting, finance and economics research on US data breaches

This data article describes a dataset of data breaches in US listed firms over a ten-year period. Data breaches represent major events that pose serious challenges to organisations. The number of incidents has been on the increase over the last decade and this has attracted the interest of the media, consumers and regulators. While there is a well-established literature on cybersecurity in Computer Science and Information Systems journals, studies exploring the economic and business impacts of data breaches represent a relatively recent phenomenon. There is a nascent but fast-growing literature in accounting, finance and economics that focuses on the financial impacts of data breaches and this dataset provides a useful resource for future studies in this space. By providing data on the company identifier, the type of breach, the dates of breach disclosure, and relates these dates to the company's fiscal year, the dataset can be merged quickly with existing accounting and finance datasets. The dataset includes data on 506 incidents over a ten-year period thereby enabling cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses.