Data Breach Bingo
Privacy 101
by Darity Wesley
If it’s against state law, it’s generally considered a breach of etiquette. ~Judith Martin
With all of the personally identifiable information floating out there in cyberspace, it seems like it we ought to have figured out how to keep it secure by now. But no. We are currently in a murky era of data breach bonanzas.
A ‘data breach’ occurs when sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so. To help picture this concept, think of it as a data spill. Like an oil spill, sometimes it can be easily contained and cleaned up, sometimes not.
This is kind of disconcerting. As of now, the federal list of 249 major health information breaches that have occurred since September 2009 is likely to have impacted more than 10 million people as of now. What’s even worse is that, according to the McAfee/SAIC report, some companies sweep their breaches under the notification carpet, not reporting them to interested parties like stockholders or government agencies or you. That makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, as I know that there is nothing I can do about it except to help make you more aware these situations exist.
How do you know if your information has been exposed to a data breach? Most often what happens is that we receive a detailed notification in the mail from the company that suffered the breach along with a service that offers to provide several years of free credit monitoring services as reparation. If you do receive such compensation, be sure to activate and use it. Health Net recently sent notifications to about 1.5 million customers. Someone who didn’t know of the breach and hadn’t been a Health Net customer in years asked me if this was a scam. I advised it was true and it didn’t matter if she wasn’t a current customer of Health Net if they still had her information, so signup for the credit monitoring.
The question is, does your business store personal information like email addresses, credit card numbers or health information? Find out what your data breach risk exposure is using this handy calculator from the Ponemon Institute.
In these interesting times, it is hard to not have your personal information on file out there. Many business transactions are partially if not fully conducted electronically. The best thing we can do is to stay aware and alert as to the security of the information we are entrusted with professionally and our own personal information. Additionally, your Privacy Gurus® can help you analyze and establish a data breach risk program for your business.
