Yeah 10s of millions being stolen under the nose wow
Sure.
Actually it’s more like hundreds of millions of records being stolen now. But the records in these cases are small; personal information like passwords and email addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The information is often in database or spreadsheet form. So one file can cover tens of thousands of clients. That’s what makes the scale of commercial breaches so large.
In the case of the security files I was mentioning, each of these files are 50 and 75 pages long (depending on how extensive the background reporting is). So when you steal 23 million of these files, that’s a heck of a lot of data passing out of the government’s servers unnoticed. IIRC, the hack was actually discovered by an outside IT security firm looking for new business.