In the old westerns it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad; the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black. But, when it comes to identity theft and hackers, the bad guys are invisible, and the people we thought were the good guys either refuse to wear their hats or can’t remember where they left them.
A recent study by the Ponemon Institute and Absolute Software Corp. revealed that 56% of business managers had disabled their computers’ encryption. Adding to the impact, 92% of IT security professionals said someone in their organization has lost their laptop or had it stolen. In 71% of those incidents, a data breach resulted.
The findings of this study echo those reported earlier this month by Verizon Business. Their data breach study found that 67% of the data breaches occurring in 2008 were aided by significant employee error; 83% were of no, low or moderate difficult; 81% of victim organizations were not Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant.
While these revelations go a long way toward explaining the 285,000,000 records compromised in data breaches last year, they don’t explicitly prescribe means of identity theft protection for consumers, in what is obviously a Wild West zeitgeist.
LifeLock provides identity theft protection to nearly 1.5 million Americans, helping to protect them. Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about WalletLock, eRecon and TrueAddress—services and tools not available from any other identity theft protection service.
3 Comments
What??!!??
Not willing to take the extra step should cost them jobs! It’s there for a reason!
With so many people looking for jobs, you;d think they could find better employees, but the managers are even worse than the people they hire!
We get told to encrypt at every staff mtg, but the managers ragging on us don’t do it! We’ve lost 4 laptops so far this year. Think they were encrypted?