Darren Pauli reports:
The number of Australian data breaches reported to forensic investigators has already doubled those experienced in 2010, even though it’s only April.
Some of the worst breaches have cost businesses many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and involved significant loss of credit card information and customer information.
Yet it seems that none of the breaches handled by forensic investigators Verizon and Klein&Co have been reported by the media.
“The old adage that all press is good press has been thoroughly dispelled,” Verizon investigative response director Mark Goudie said. “None of the cases have been reported by media to my knowledge.”
Most of the breaches, which this year were twice as numerous as those reported over same time in 2010, succeeded through basic information security bungles such as the use of lax passwords and default user access rights, Goudie said.
Klein&Co has already handled more than a third of the number of severe credit card breaches this year than it handled in 2010.
“This year we’ve handled between ten to 15 [credit card] breaches. We handled 33 during the whole of 2010,” director Nick Klein said.
He said the major banks and card issuers have reported similar increases.
Read more on ZDNet (AU). It sounds like Australians should be protesting loudly that they need legislation requiring mandatory data breach notification.