Fergie's Tech Blog

Hackers Get Bum Rap for Corporate America's Digital Delinquency

Via PhysOrg.com.

If Phil Howard’s calculations prove true, by year’s end the 2 billionth personal record – some American’s social-security or credit-card number, academic grades or medical history – will become compromised, and it’s corporate America, not rogue hackers, who are primarily to blame. By his reckoning, electronic records in the United States are bleeding at the rate of 6 million a month in 2007, up some 200,000 a month from last year.

Howard, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington, bases his projections on a review of breached-record incidents as reported in major U.S. news media from 1980 to 2006. The total through last year stood at 1.9 billion – or roughly nine records per American adult.

His report delving into the flood of escaping records and some of the related dynamics, co-authored with Kris Erickson, a UW geography doctoral student, will appear in the July edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. If anything, Howard contends the numbers they collected are conservative.

posted by Fergie @ 3/13/2007 01:46:00 PM