How Most Personal Data is Lost
I’ve been reading through my latest copy of Wired magazine and there is a nice little one page piece about the loss of personal data by companies.
Not surprisingly they mention that only 31 states have laws that require companies to let customers know when their information goes missing. What’s sad is that in many cases, encrypted data that is lost doesn’t have to be reported at all.
Now what got me the most were the charts on the page that broke down: How the personal data was lost, Cost to company per missing record, and Consumer reaction to data breach.
I wasn’t so much interested (though I did look) at the cost to the company per missing record. What intrested me was how the data was lost and what the customers reaction to that loss was.
The numbers were staggering to me.
As far as how the data was lost, only 7% came from hackers and 9% came from an inside job or malicious code.
So what was the biggest cause of data loss? 35% was thanks to a lost laptop or other device. 19% was due to lost electronic backups.
Perhaps you may have thought that your biggest worries were hackers swiping your credit card numbers. Unfortunately it seems like the real enemy is a company employee who forgot to eat his Wheaties and left the data laying around.
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