Data theft triple rise

11/12/2007 Written by minor

It is well known to all of us — data theft or data loss is one of the night­mares. This year sto­ries brought embar­rass­ing inci­dent in UK, 25 mil­lion peo­ple, their per­sonal and bank details are at risk thanks two disks in mail. Given fact that UK has around 60 mil­lions of cit­i­zens, more than every 3^rd is affected by this.
Num­ber is impres­sive, but it is not the only inci­dent that hap­pened this year. USA Today reported, that more than 162 mil­lions of records has been stolen this year. When com­par­ing to year 2006, when “only” more than 49.7 mil­lions were stolen, this indi­cates clearly the aim of the attack­ers — pri­vate and busi­ness data.

Analy­sis was pre­pared from data losses reported over past two years in news sto­ries and results of this year aren’t impres­sive. Affected were 98 com­pa­nies, 85 schools, 80 gov­ern­ment agen­cies and 39 hos­pi­tals and clinics.

Of course it’s not every­thing, some of cases were not published.We shouldn’t ask, why this hap­pened. Also agen­cies, com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ments and also we should not only look on issues that are pass­ing in front of them, they have to actively act against data theft and pro­tect their and own assets of high­est value — per­sonal data, because oth­er­wise it could be us, whose credit card was “cleaned” or data misused.