IT GRC Forum

Consumers tend to be oblivious to the various layers of security financial institutions utilize to protect their bank accounts. But having a better understanding of what occurs behind the scenes can help consumers adapt to influential new technologies.

An employee of the Utah State Department of technology must have hit the snooze button when he launched a test server that resulted in the breach of 780,000 Medicaid records including over 250,000 Social Security numbers.

The 2012 Identity Fraud Report: Social Media and Mobile Forming the New Fraud Frontier report released by Javelin Strategy & Research Data Breaches increasing and more damaging – “One likely contributing factor to the fraud increase was the 67 percent increase in the number of Americans impacted by data breaches compared to 2010. Javelin Strategy & Research found victims of data breaches are 9.5 times more likely to be a victim of identity fraud than consumers who did not receive such a data breach letter. The survey found 15 percent of Americans, or about 36 million people, were notified of a data breach in 2011.”

Over the past 15 years, the increasingly rapid evolution of technology has resulted in new computers or mobile phones becoming outdated in a matter of one or two years. Chances are, you’ve gone through no less than ten digital devices in the past decade, if not more. It has become standard practice to upgrade to a newer device and often sell, donate, or discard the old one. Or you’ve received a new computer or mobile phone for a holiday gift and need to get rid of the old one.

Recently UCLA announced 16,000 patients were potential victims of identity theft because a doctor’s home office was broken into and burglarized. This is an unfortunate example of an employee taking home a laptop or storage device from the office resulting in a serious data breach. The thief may have no idea what he has in his hands, but the damage is done, the data is breached.

The ticker tape of data breaches in the last few months has been astounding. Many have called 2011 “The Year of The Hacker“ and that prognostication has rung true, without question. Halfway through the year, data breaches are an incessant news story.

According to a recent report from Verizon, data breaches are on the rise. There were 760 data breaches recorded in 2010, compared to 140 breaches in 2009. However, there were approximately four million records stolen in 2010, as opposed to 144 million stolen in 2009.