What do Tulane University, South Carolina State Employee Insurance Program, National Guard Headquarters - Santa Fe NM, BlueCross/BlueShield –Michigan, Seacoast Radiology, and University of Connecticut -HuskyDirect.com have in common? They were just a few of the companies that reported security breaches in January 2011.
Information management is critically important to all of us – as employees and consumers. For that reason, the Identity Theft Resource Center has been tracking security breaches since 2005, looking for patterns, new trends and any information that may better help us protect data and assist companies in their activities.
In prior issues of Risky Business, I posted this brief article and supporting statistics about security breaches. I was curious to see how the data changed. You can see for yourself below in the last line.
The following data was collected from Identity Theft Resource Center® website idtheftcenter.org and refers to the number of total data breaches that were reported with an estimate of how many records were exposed:
2005 Breach List: Breaches: 157 Exposed: 66,853,201
2006 Breach List: Breaches: 321 Exposed: 19,137,844
2007 Breach List: Breaches: 446 Exposed: 127,717,024
2008 Breach List: Breaches: 656 Exposed: 35,691,255
2009 Breach List: Breaches: 498 Exposed: 222,477,043
2010 Breach List: Breaches: 662 Exposed: 16,167,542
You must understand that the majority of the reported breaches do not reveal the actual number of exposed records so therefore the number is MUCH larger than what is listed here.
Your call to action is to ensure your Information Risk Management Program is as secure as you think it is and as secure as your stakeholders, customers, Board of Director’s believe it to be. Aujas is helping organizations manage risk and enhance information value with practical, innovative solutions!
