Encryption Blog

Andrew Klein | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Andrew Klein - Senior Product Marketing Manager

According to the folks at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, since 2005 there have been over a thousand data breaches leading to over 320 million compromised records in the United States alone. These records contained personal, financial and corporate information – none of which was encrypted.

The term “record” might imply a database record, but a majority of the breached records were not stored in a database, but instead were stored in “files” such as spreadsheets, documents and log files. These files were stored on laptops, desktops, CDs and USB drives, which were stolen, lost or compromised. Some were files transferred in-the-clear over unprotected networks. There were also breaches which occurred when personal financial information was posted on a web site, Social Security Account Numbers were...

The First Data Breach

Tim_Matthews | 05 Nov 2012 | 1 comment

At the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on the topic of data breaches and how to handle them. Along with Larry Ponemon, Founder and Chairman of the Ponemon Institute, and Jerry Archer, SVP and CSO at Sallie Mae, was David Shettler from the Open Security Foundation (OSF), publishers of DataLossDB.

Post-panel, as we were walking back through Moscone, David answered a question I had been wondering about: When was the first reported data breach? Turns out that it happened over a century ago, in 1896, where the dispensary records for the Southern California Hospital for the Insane went missing, and were thought to be stolen. So protection of PHI...

Sharing Data in an Unsecure World-Portable Encryption for Microsoft Windows 7

Shilpi Dey | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

These days you don’t need to wait for holiday sales to buy the tiniest, highest capacity USB thumb drive you can find. A 2GB USB drive sells for under $10 in the US, and works great to put family pictures, your favorite music (yes, the 80s were a good era) and oh yeah, the customer files you need to share with Bob at the audit firm. There’s only one problem: these drives tend to get lost easily, or as what often happens with most people, you just can’t remember where you put it. If that happens, you have now put out confidential company data (and possibly personal data) free for all to see, out into the world. This can very quickly turn into an organizational nightmare when it turns out that the drive was indeed lost, and now your organization has to inform investors, its customers, and just about everybody else about this loss. A look at the...

The Critical Need For Encrypted Email

Robin Witty | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Robin Witty-Senior Product Marketing Manager

Are your company's emails really secure? Do you know for sure when most email sent over the Internet is in clear text and can be read by anyone with simple tools and know-how. Similar to the old party line telephone systems where neighbors could listen in on your phone calls, unauthorized parties can obtain confidential information from unencrypted corporate emails including valuable intellectual property or third party data that may require protection regulated by law.

If you think email breaches can’t happen to your company, consider a couple of high profile email breaches. Sarah Palin’s personal emails were posted to the web and her password was changed by a hacker. A...

Data Loss DB Breach Data-Breaches Classified by Sector

Doug McLean | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

The Data Loss Database is a record of data breaches going back to 1995. As such it is one of the most comprehensive records of global breaches. Maintained by the Open Security Foundation, the DataLoss DB is published monthly. Below is the classification of all recorded breaches by sector since 1995.

data-loss-db-sector

Data Loss DB Breach Data-Breaches Classified by Source

Doug McLean | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

data-loss-db-source

The Insider Threat

Kevin Albright | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Kevin Albright A recent data breach at Johns Hopkins Hospital was announced that resulted from a single employee working in patient registration who accessed more than 10,000 pieces of personally identifying information. Reports of fraud started back in January and have been traced to records at Johns Hopkins.

The employee in question has been linked to a larger driver’s license fraud scheme in nearby Virginia. These types of incidents have been appearing more and more; while we protect against attacks coming across the internet with firewalls, and malware...

Data Loss DB Breach Data - Breaches Classified by Type

Doug McLean | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

Below is the classification of all recorded breaches by type since 1995.

Historical Data Loss by Type

Lies, Damn Lies, & Data Breaches

Doug McLean | 05 Nov 2012 | 0 comments

A report out of the Identity Theft Resource Center claims that the number of data breaches in 2008 has already surpassed 2007's total of 446. While it's intuitively obvious that the number of data breaches is increasing, I have a hard time putting much credence in the actual numbers reported by the ITRC or the reasons they cite for the increase.

The first problem with counting data breaches is that we all need to admit that the only statistics we see at all are reported data breaches. Until 2003 when California passed the watershed legislation in this field, SB 1386, very few breaches had to be reported and predictably almost none were. Initially, many global enterprises ignored SB 1386 assuming that if they didn't have a presence in California they weren't subject to it's requirements. It took awhile before most enterprises, particularly those outside of...

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