February 26,2009
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News: 656 Credit Card Breaches Reported Last Year.
To recap last year, many are not aware of the high number of credit card breaches that occurred last year. Many are not aware that credit card breaches had jumped a serious 47% over 2007. This new revelation was released by a recent ITRC (Identity Theft Resource Center) study. These credit card breaches were further broken down according to five basic sectors. The basic credit card breach-categories that ITRC chose in their study were:
1) Business;
2) Educational;
3) Government/military;
4) Health;
5) Financial/credit.Although there were 656 total credit card breaches reported, oddly enough, the financial/credit category reported the lowest percentage (11.9% or 78 in number) of the five. As the ITRC explains it: "The financial, banking and credit industries have remained the most proactive groups in terms of data protection." The total figure of stolen credit card records reported was around 35.7 million but, ITRC believes the true figure to be much higher as, evidence indicates that as many as 41.9% more were never reported.
Volume-wise, the financial/credit category doesn't look as good. In volume, over half of the total percentage reported (52.5% or 18.1 million) come from this category. The biggest single breach in this category was attributed to BNY Mellon Shareowner Services. They had to report the lose of around 12.5 million credit card records. Even more damaging was the theft of vital personal information like: Social security numbers; Names and; Addresses. One glaring problem that is now a number one issue since the Heartland breach is that, the data was unencrypted.
The total over-all breakdown follows:
o 3.5% caused by hacking at financial firms;
o 2.4% caused by insider theft;
o 1.7% caused by data on the move (like at Heartland);
o 0.8% caused by negligent exposure;
o 0.8% caused by subcontractor activities.As far as breaches tied to media format:
o 82.3% were in electronic form;
o 7.7% were in paper form.All the rage today is focused on ‘adequate' encryption' Of all of these cases reported, almost none of the credit card records were even encrypted (97.6%). This was the problem at Heartland, even though they were almost totally encrypted. Thieves still found that tiny breachable weak spot. That's the best news. Even worse is that, 91.5% of these breached credit card records didn't even have password protection.