John Leyden reports: The security threat from carelessly ditched computers increasingly applies to a much wider range of office equipment, as sophisticated storage technology finds its way into humble devices such as fax machines and printers. The risk that sensitive documents might make their way into the hands of undesirables was neatly illustrated by a…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Symantec survey: companies retaining way too much way too long
Symantec Corp. released the findings of its 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey, which hammers home a point I made the other day about getting rid of unnecessary data. For the current survey, Symantec surveyed 1,680 enterprises in 26 countries. They found that while 87% of respondents believe in the value of a formal information…
Closing a Door on Child Identity Theft
The Identity Theft Resource Center offers a solution to the problem that has made headlines this week — young children have their pristine SSN misused to create credit histories for those who have poor credit ratings, are illegal immigrants, or have other illegal intent: Since the 1980’s, children in the US have been issued Social…
Break’s over: after decline in 2009, breach reports appear to rise in 2010
The Verizon breach analysis report released this past week reported declines in 2009 in both the number of records compromised and the number of breaches Verizon was asked to investigate. Their reported decline in number of breaches has some confirmation in reports from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Identity Theft Resource Center, who…
Three breach reports, three sides of the elephant?
The recently released reports by Verizon, ArcSight/Ponemon, and Digital Forensics all offer some interesting data and statistics on breaches, but after reading them, I am reminded of the analogy of the six blind men and the elephant, as their findings are not always wholly consistent with each other. If we can generalize from the Verizon…
AU: Personal data ‘left open to frauds’
Richard Willingham reports: The security of personal information held by the state government is inadequate, leaving it at a heightened risk of being stolen and misused by frauds, a report has found. An Auditor-General’s report into government departments, released yesterday, said access to confidential personal data was too widespread and increased the risk of identity…