The 2007 costs are rolling in.
Now that we’re a couple of weeks into 2008, the fraud statistics are starting to roll in. As one would expect, they aren’t pretty.
I just finished going over a report by Ponemon Institute, LLC that was sponsored by PGP and Vontu entitled 2007 Annual Study: U.S. Cost of a Data Breach.
The document has a lot of good information in it but one of the things that struck me was the report that a full 49% of the data breaches reported in the statistics were from lost or stolen devices such as laptops, USB flash drives, and the like. That translates to the fact that half of the data breaches in 2007 were preventable! Sure, a few of those items were probably stolen in burglaries but from what I’ve seen, the largest number of reported thefts of hardware resulted because the hardware was somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. You know; the front seat of a government official’s car parked at Starbuck’s - that sort of thing. Were the breaches reported in this survey a result of that? I don’t know, but if you look at the 2007 archives at Attrition.org you’ll see that it’s clearly the cause of a huge number of data exposures.
Way back in February of 2006, I Blogged about this sort of stupidity. The trend continues. Your personal information is in the hands of people that just don’t care!
