Cultivating Data Security: What's Real, What's Tail-Chasing

摘要

It's been hard not to see evidence of the increasing tide of criminal data thefts lately., This year alone, CitiFinancial's data breach was announced in June, LexisNexis in April, and both Bank of America and ChoicePoint in February. These are only the highlights...there were many more, including banks, catalog companies and universities. Most organizations would like to avoid seeing their names in The Wall Street Journal under similar circumstances, but most of them are doing little more than crossing their fingers and hoping. The problem is this: data security breaches can happen in many ways, so it's hard to know which tower to man the strongest. The ChoicePoint data breach occurred when criminals posing as legitimate customers asked to purchase, and were sold, the personal data of 145,000 people. (There was not, in this case, any hacking involved.).