Last year there were 656 reported data breaches, and—sorry to have to say it again–2009 is looking even grimmer.
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse lists only 60 reported data breaches so far this year, or an average of roughly one a day. But that relatively low incident rate belies a more sinister trend: 22 of those data breaches affected an unknown number of people.
The greatest threat to consumers’ identities is the Heartland Payment Systems hacking that first made news in January. Though the number of individual credit card account affected remains a mystery, it is known that Heartland processed roughly 100 million transactions a month. Speculation is that the total will be greater than the TJX data breach in which more than 100 million accounts were compromised.
Also on the list of unknowns are some potentially massive breaches, if not in terms of the number of records exposed, definitely in the level of identity theft hazard because of the nature or extent of information lost or stolen.
Genica/Geeks.com: eCommerce site hacked, revealing customers’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers, expiration dates and card verification numbers.
Monster.com: IDs, passwords, names, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases, users’ states of residence were stolen.
U.S. Consulate: Hundreds of files were left in a file cabinet sold at auction in Jerusalem. Files contained Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and other sensitive U.S. government information.
Citi Habitat: Bank statements, credit reports, tax returns, 401k statements, driver’s licenses, names, phone numbers and Social Security numbers were among the information found blowing in the streets of Manhattan when files that should have been shredded were thrown in the trash instead.
HoneyBaked Hams: computer server storing customers’ credit card information stolen.
Kaspersky Labs: Hackers broke into the security software company’s databases and gained access to users’ accounts, activation codes and possibly customers’ personal information.
Los Alamos National Laboratory: 72 computers and a BlackBerry missing.
CVS: Customers’ personal, medical and insurance information discarded as trash rather than being shredded.
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Tags: Data breach, Identity Theft, LifeLock
i’m writing to say that after reading so much about data breaches, identity theft and credit fraud, in addition to the barrage of bad economic news, I’m swearing off and will no longer subject myself to so much bad news.
My wife and I have identity theft/credit fraud protection. We can’t afford to withdraw money from the market. Our retirement savings and 401(k)s are in the toilet. All we can do now is stay the course and try to achieve and maintain optimism.
No sense waiting and worrying about the final numbers; we’re screwed.
my God, I believed you were going to chip in with some decisive insight at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.