Handling Goofs Cause Many Data Leaks
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2211531,00.asp
By Lisa Vaas
eWeek
November 2, 2007
A sizable chunk of business data is being lost electronically in simple
misconfiguration mistakes.
Since January 2005, there have been 167.7 million records containing
sensitive personal information exposed by security breaches, according
to a running total kept by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
The question is, How does this information get out there?
Loss or theft of a physical object forms by far the largest hole in data
security. According to an analysis (PDF) done recently by David
Litchfield of Next Generation Security Software, based in Surrey,
England, 43 percent of records lost since Jan. 1 slipped out of
organizations on paper, computers, laptops, disks or backup media.
Other researchers put the figure higher for records that were exposed
due to lost or stolen computers or mediasecurity expert Chris Walsh has
analyzed New York data sets and puts the figure closer to 99 percent.