As announced by the good folks at DataLossDB.org today, I’ve agreed to work with them in terms of maintaining and developing their database. DataBreaches.net and PHIprivacy.net will continue as they always have, but expect to see more breaches show up in DataLossDB in a timely fashion and expect to see more backfilling over time and more primary sources that I will be requesting under FOIA. We have some big plans, so do stay tuned.
Their announcement:
The Open Security Foundation is pleased to announce that Dissent, the publisher and maintainer of DataBreaches.net and PHIprivacy.net has now joined DataLossDB as a curator for the project.
OSF has worked with Dissent over the years and she is already known to us a DataLoss Archaeologist, as she took third place in our “Oldest Incident” contest. She found the 1984 TRW incident, where computer hackers gained access to a system holding credit histories of some 90 million people which happens to be the 3rd largest breaches of all time in DataLossDB. Her more active involvement with the project on a day-to-day basis will help us remain the most complete archive of dataloss incidents world-wide and will enhance our ability to keep current on more breaches in a timely manner. Dissent will continue to maintain her own web sites as a resource on breach news and issues.
For those who do not know Dissent, she’s a practicing health care professional with a special concern for health care sector breaches, and we expect to see increased coverage of medical sector breaches in the database in months to come. As Dissent notes, “With recent changes to federal laws making more information available to us about health care sector breaches, we are now beginning to get some sense of how common these breaches are and the common breach types. Including these incidents in the database will enable analyses that would not have been possible or meaningful just a few years ago.”
Open Security Foundation’s CEO, Jake Kouns says, “Dissent has been a supporter of DataLossDB from the very beginning and is an extremely dedicated and thorough researcher.” “We are extremely fortunate to have her as part of the DataLossDB team and look forward to working more closely with her.”
Welcome Dissent, our newest curator and resident research queen!
Note that Jake was being diplomatic/professional. Personally, I would have preferred the title of “resident research bitch,” which is reminiscent of how my grad students fondly nicknamed me “Stat Bitch” back in my days as an academic teaching research design and statistical analysis.
Well, I think it was fondly, anyway…