29% of departing directors admit stealing data, finds survey
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Corporate espionage Almost a third of company directors surveyed have admitted to stealing corporate information, with memory sticks making theft easier than ever.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Contrary to popular perception, computer data breaches are less likely to result in identity theft and other fraud than off-line causes such as lost or stolen wallets and checkbooks. That was the finding of a year-long study of about 5,000 U.S. consumers by Pleasanton, Calif.-based analyst firm Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin's research showed that despite recent hype, data breaches were responsible for just 6 percent of all known cases of identity theft, compared to 30 percent from incidents like losing one's wallet. The study also showed that less than 1 percent of all individuals whose data was lost later became victims of ID theft. Javelin's results are similar to those found by other firms that have looked at the relationship between data breaches and actual instances of ID fraud. In a Gartner study in 2005, for instance, only 18 percent of identity theft victims attributed the cause to computer breaches, while 41 percent cited off-line causes. Similarly, a December 2005 analysis by ID Analytics Inc. of four major online data breaches involving 500,000 customer records showed that less than 1 percent of those affected had their identities stolen. The numbers are important at a time when a spate of data breach disclosures has heightened consumer concerns and is fueling a debate among lawmakers about the need for more stringent data protection laws, analysts said. "There is a misperception that there is a one-to-one correlation between a data breach and ID theft," said Thomas Oscherwitz, vice president of government affairs and chief privacy officer at San Diego-based ID Analytics. In reality, "the mere fact that you are part of a data breach doesn't mean that you are a victim of ID theft," he said. The degree of risk can depend on the type of breach, Oscherwitz said. Data breaches involving a deliberate hacking, for instance, are likely to be much more risky than those involving a lost disk or laptop, he said. Failing to make such distinctions can push consumers to undertake unnecessary efforts to protect themselves and can impose burdens on corporations, said Mary Monahan, author of the Javelin study. "Our opinion is that consumers do need to be protected by data breach laws, and we do want to see a federal law to protect all consumers," Monahan said. But given the low risk of ID theft from such breaches, any such law would need to give the breached entity the opportunity to conduct a risk assessment before they are required to disclose it publicly; The absence of such a trigger could result in indiscriminate notifications. "And then all you get is white noise" that few people pay attention to, Monahan said. Currently, many of the 30-plus states that have breach disclosure laws require companies to notify customers of any data breach involving the potential compromise of personally identifiable information. Several industry groups have been lobbying lawmakers for a preemptive federal law that would add some sort of a breach notification trigger that is based on an assessment of the risk of ID theft or other fraud. Privacy advocates, on the other hand, have been arguing for broad disclosure, saying that few companies are likely to publicly notify consumers of a breach if they are allowed to make their own risk assessments. "I think it's always going to be difficult to make a conclusive cause-and-effect relationship between ID theft and data breaches," said Andrew Jacquith, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. So the real emphasis of any national legislation has to be on measures that companies need to take to protect sensitive customer data, he said. Also important is the need to examine issues like the continuing use of Social Security numbers as identifiers by a large number of companies, Jacquith said. "I view nonpublic information as radioactive material that needs to be protected [from leaks]," he said. "It's material that you can use to manufacture identities with."
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Users of a Web site operated by the U.S. government were among job seekers whose contact data was stolen by hackers who broke into computers at Monster Worldwide Inc, a U.S. government spokesman said on Thursday.
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Stephen Richards will pay more than $29 million in restitution as part of an accounting fraud at the company.
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Revelations that the company supervised an extensive investigation of some of its directors, journalists and a few employees has blemished its reputation.
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Identity theft victims are also losing more money and getting less of it back, research shows.
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A report funded by the banking industry finds U.S. ID fraud is down by a half-million victims in 2006. But a data-privacy expert says the study is dead wrong. In 27B Stroke 6.
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Blog: Auditors say only a fraction of largest intrusions in recent years showed clear evidence of resulting identity theft, but they admit that's not always easy to gauge.
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Data on more than 100 million U.S. consumers has been compromised in the past two years, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
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Online tricksters looking to dupe consumers out of credit card numbers and other personal information have netted about $500 million from their hapless victims in the US, a national study released Wednesday showed.
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Backup volumes in many organizations have grown so large that they are causing business disruption by tying up systems, storage, and network capacity and hogging valuable IT resources, according to a recent survey commissioned by storage management software vendor BridgeHead Software.More than half (59 percent) of IT executives said that the volume of data they are forced to backup is disrupting business operations or will do so eventually, according to a survey of 472 IT executives in the U.K. and North America. And the problem is not going away, with 93 percent saying that their routine backup volumes are continuing to increase.The problem is consuming IT resources for long periods with 37 percent admitting that daily backups of primary data now take them more than nine hours, while 19 percent said it took them more than 12 hours.More than two-thirds (84 percent) of those polled felt they could benefit by reducing the volume of data they routinely back up. Among the chief advantages highlighted were:* Less IT time devoted to backup and other business continuity processes (69 percent) * A reduction in the impact of backup and replication on network utilization and capacity (60 percent) * A reduction in disk resources devoted to data snapshotting, replication, and mirroring (58 percent) * Reduced disruption to the live application environment (45 percent)One of the most effective ways of reducing the pressure on backups is to take information that is static or seldom accessed and archive it off primary storage systems according to BridgeHead Software CEO Tony Cotterill."Sixty-one percent of organizations in our survey admit that between 30 to 50 percent of data on their primary disk is unlikely to be accessed ever again, yet they are squandering time and resources on backing up and replicating this big chunk of static data. It's a very poor use of resources," said Cotterill.BridgeHead said its research reveals that many organizations are starting to use archiving for specific types of data, such as e-mails, motivated by compliance and disaster recovery. According to the company, a lot of archiving activity is currently championed by finance and other business departments outside of IT's control.But to have a major impact on backup volumes, BridgeHead reckoned that there needs to be an IT-driven move away from point solutions or isolated archive appliances towards taking an organization-wide approach to archiving, allowing IT to retrieve control by archiving all data types across the organization from a single point."If you can take an organization-wide approach to archiving, then the volume of data you're taking off the primary store will start to reach a critical mass that will help call a halt to increasing backup volumes," said Cotterill.The survey was part of BridgeHead Software's Annual Information Lifecycle Management Audit, conducted by eMedia on behalf of BridgeHead Software during August 2007. eMedia surveyed 324 senior level executives, IT managers, system and network administrators and engineers from North America and 148 from the U.K.Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Use of databases to purge voter rolls led to complaints of people being wrongly excluded.
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Some members discover itâs tough to erase all their information from the site.
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Blog: Government auditors say only a fraction of the largest intrusions in recent years showed clear evidence of resulting identity theft, but they admit that's not always easy to gauge.
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About 146,000 people using a jobs Web  site sponsored by the U.S. government have had their personal  information stolen by hackers who broke into computers at  Monster Worldwide Inc, a government spokesman said on Thursday.
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25% now strongly against their use, amid fears over sharing of personal details, says ICM survey
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Identity thieves who hit Monster.com's database earlier this month also stole the personal information of 146,000 people who use USAJobs, the federal government's official job search site.