Fergie's Tech Blog

How Are U.S. Businesses and Lawmakers Responding to Data Breaches?

Melanie Rodier writes on Wall Street & Technology:

There were 305 publicized data breaches affecting nearly 77 million individuals in the United States in the first nine months of 2007, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that works to prevent identity theft. Of these incidents, 6.2 percent were reported by banking, credit and financial services institutions.

Law firm Scott + Scott, which recently conducted a separate survey on data breaches with privacy and information management research firm The Ponemon Institute, reports that almost half the data breaches it recorded were attributed to lost or stolen equipment, such as laptops, PDAs and memory sticks. The second largest threat, according to the Colchester, Conn.-based firm, arose from negligent employees, temporary employees and/or contractors. The survey, "The Business Impact of Data Breach," examined the responses of more than 700 U.S.-based C-level executives, managers and IT security officers in midsize to large businesses spanning all industries.

But despite the frequency of such security failures, 42 percent of respondents to the Scott + Scott survey whose companies have suffered data breaches claimed their organization's IT security spending will remain the same in the coming year. Even after suffering a data breach, 46 percent of businesses failed to implement encryption solutions, and 82 percent did not seek legal counsel prior to responding to the incident -- even though they had no prior response plan in place.

posted by Fergie @ 10/24/2007 05:50:00 PM