Yes, there was a time when a hacker was a pimply-faced guy sitting in his parents’ basement surrounded by pizza boxes and bulky PCs. But that’s not who’s responsible for data breaches in this millennium.
Increasingly, it’s insiders who are stealing their organizations’ information, according to recent studies.
Insiders were responsible for almost 25% of all known data breaches in financial institutions last year, according to a recent study sponsored by Cisco and conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center.
Verizon Business’ 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report attributes at least 20% of all 2008 data breaches to insiders. Insider data breaches are more damaging because an insider data breach involves the loss or exposure of 100,000 records on average. The total number of records lost to insiders in 2008 was more than 1.33 million, according to the report.
The most obvious reason employees are stealing information is that they can. A survey of nearly 1,000 people who’d been laid-off or fired revealed that 85% of employers failed to perform an audit of hard copy or electronic data employees left with when terminated or laid off.
Not surprisingly, the Ponemon Institute survey also found that 60% of the respondents said they stole customer information, contact lists, employee records, financial reports and more when they left. As well, 24% of them said they were still able to electronically access their former employers’ data months after leaving.
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2 Comments
Lifelock practices have been declared illegal by a US district Judge and they have been ordered to stop.
Try doing your homework before recommending a company going down the pan.
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Thanks for reading the posts, Dewie.
Please note that there has never been an injunction or cease and desist order issued against LifeLock, and they are not acting in violation of any court orders.
The “declaration” you refer to is, in fact, only a pre-trial partial summary judgment. The “practice” addressed by the court is the issuing of fraud alerts for consumers concerned that they are or will be victims of ID theft–a service provided by many identity theft protection services.
For more information about LifeLock and their business practices, please see The Better Business Bureau’s assessment–they’ve given LifeLock the only A+ rating in the ID theft protection industry, and they report that there have been only 41 complaints against LifeLock in 3 years, all of which were resolved to the customers’ satisfaction. Given that LifeLock has nearly 1.5 million customers, that means if all 41 had been filed in a single year, that would amount to only 1 complaint per 36,500 customers.
Taken all together, I consider this to be ample evidence of LifeLock’s reliability and respectability, and an indication of their expected longevity.