A breach involving paper records just became my last breach post for 2010. It seems somehow appropriate, as breaches involving paper records constitute over 20% of breaches I find out about but they’re often not taken as seriously, it seems, as breaches involving large electronic databases. Yet these types of breaches, which often go unreported, may contribute to fraud and ID theft. There are reasons most people do not know how their identity information got compromised: they may not realize their mail has been stolen, they may not realize that someone discarded a credit card receipt with full credit card info on it, or they may not know that some business or healthcare entity simply threw out their sensitive data, unshredded.
So now begins the inevitable analyses of data breaches for the year. Most of the analyses will be fundamentally flawed or confounded because they do not appreciate the methods used to compile breaches or they ignore critical artifacts:
- At least one article will trumpet that healthcare breaches skyrocketed, without realizing that this is just the first year that we’ve had actual reports on health care sector breaches from the govt and they may not have skyrocketed at all.
- At least one article will trumpet that overall, breaches are way down because the DataLossDB.org end of year figures for 2010 appear much lower than 2009 end of year figures. They won’t recognize that DataLossDB.org’s 2009 figures have been backfilled and that a more valid comparison would be to compare what the database shows at the end of 2010 to what it showed on Dec. 31, 2009 – not what it shows now for 2009.
- At least one article will trumpet that overall, breaches are way up because the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse number of breaches for 2010 is significantly higher than it was for 2009. They won’t recognize that PRC only began really using my blogs to fuel their chronology in 2010 and the addition of those resources significantly increased their breach counter for 2010.
- At least one article will try to compare sectors within the year and over years and will screw it all up by not appreciating that percent of all breaches is not helpful when you’ve suddenly started getting reports from just one of the sectors.
I will grit my teeth reading the analyses, as I do every year. You can lead journalists to information, but you can’t make them really use it.
Here’s hoping that 2011 will be a more secure year, that those who still haven’t protected against SQL injections will finally get their acts together, that the govt will get serious about passing a meaningful data breach notification law, that states will sue those who treat protected information with callous disregard, and that none of us becomes victims of fraud.