For perspective, given the massive tax refund fraud/ID theft in the U.S. Isabelle Oderberg reports: Over 23,300 Australians had their tax file number compromised in the 2012 financial year, according to data from the Australian Taxation Office, up from 22,000 last year. “Certainly, the delay in many tax refunds is because they have to go…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Maryland cyberdefenses lacking, finds residents’ info may be at risk – Audit
Aaron C. Davis reports some of the findings from an audit of Maryland’s Department of Information Technology and some other state agencies: … state agencies have not consistently or adequately protected personal identifiable information, such as residents’ Social Security numbers. They also have not consistently reported data breaches, according to the state’s nonpartisan Department of…
Average insurance cost per data breach rises to $3.7M: Study
Mike Tsikoudakis reports: The average insurance cost per data breach incident increased sharply from $2.4 million in 2010 to $3.7 million in 2011, according to a new NetDiligence study released Tuesday. Based on insurance claims that were submitted in 2011 for incidents that occurred from 2009 to 2011, the average number of records exposed decreased…
The City of Tulsa’s costly screw-up
The saga of the City of Tulsa hack-that-wasn’t-a-hack fascinates me and would be funny if it wasn’t such a costly foul-up. While the city’s IT manager is on paid administrative leave, Ian Silver of Fox23 provides some additional details , most notably: To their credit, the city had hired SecurityMetrics 18 months ago to periodically…
Police shed light on Japan’s black market for personal info
I just read an interesting news piece related to the previous blog entry on the black market sale of personal information in Japan. It seems that Japan’s personal information protection law which went into effect in 2005 created the market, and one group made almost $11 million using employees of numerous companies to provide the…
The staggering cost of a data breach
Occasionally, I check Global Payments’ site for information on what their breach(es) last year cost them. Here’s what they reported in their SEC 10-K/A filing today: For the year ended May 31, 2012, we have recorded $84.4 million of expense associated with this incident. Of this amount, $19.0 million represents the costs we have incurred…