[Photo:  Data Breach - Forbes.com]

A financial advisor at Ameriprise Financial accidentally exposed hundreds of investment portfolios last week. The portfolios were valued in the tens of millions of dollars, according to a report at ZDnet. The advisor had an internet-connected backup hard drive at home set to synchronize over the internet with the office hard drive. Neither had a password.

The exposed data was uncovered on Shodan, which proclaims that it's the world's 1^st search engine for Internet-connected devices. The data included Social Security, bank account and financial planning data for around 350 high-value customers. The drive also had the advisor's personal files and a backup of his password manager's data. At this time it's not clear if the data breach exposed data that is widely used across AMP's nearly 10,000 advisors.

The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports 980 data breaches recorded this year through 12/13/16, and that more than 35 million records have been exposed since the beginning of the year. In 2015, there were only 781 breaches.

Since beginning to track data breaches in 2005, ITRC had counted 6,789 breaches through 1213, involving more than 886 million records.