www.iltanet.org
54
Peer to Peer
A Data Breach
Pandemic
T
he frequency of data breaches has accelerated in
the last few years as businesses continue to expand
globally, increase interactions with partners,
suppliers and business associates, and collect and
store more data about their customers and clients.
A number of major security breaches regarding personal
records have made headlines over the past decade. The
following examples comprise only a very small number of the
nearly 350 million sensitive records that have been involved in
data breaches from 2005 through 2009.
For eight days in May 2006, an unsecured document was •
exposed on the FTP site of the New Mexico Administrative
Office of the Courts. Exposed data included the names,
birthdates, social security numbers and home addresses of
1,500 employees.
An employee with the National Finance Center mistakenly •
sent an Excel spreadsheet containing Commerce
Department employees' personal information to a co-
worker via e-mail in an unencrypted form in August 2009.
The names and social security numbers of at least 27,000
employees were exposed.
In October 2007, a computer tape containing the full names, •
addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and
marital status of 200,000 members of the West Virginia Public
Employees Insurance Agency was lost while being shipped via
United Parcel Service.
The response from federal and state authorities to
these breaches has been a growing body of regulations
mandating that confidential and personally identifiable
data be protected from data breaches both at rest and in
by Bill Ho
