By John Leyden for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
The running
total of potential compromised records recorded by the US
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse since February 2005 reached this
milestone with news last week of the loss of a laptop by a Boeing
worker, a breach that potentially affected 382,000 current and
previous workers at the aircraft manufacturer.
The running total maintained by PRC represents the approximate
number of records that have been compromised due to security
breaches, not the number of individuals affected. Individuals may
be the victims of more than one breach, which would reduce the
total number of potential victims.
Only data breaches that result in information useful to ID
thieves – such as Social Security numbers, bank account
numbers and driver's license numbers – count towards PRC's
tally, though it makes a record of other types of other (less
serious) breaches.
PRC began tracking data breaches in February 2005, when
ChoicePoint admitted that ID thieves had swiped information on
163,000 victims from the company's database. The breach was the
first significant case to fall under information security laws
passed by California in 2003, which have acted as a template for
legislation in other states. These laws have served to highlight a
problem that had undoubtedly existed for years.
As PRC points out not all incidents of data breaches result in
ID theft but the number of compromised records that it chronicles
still represents a serious cause for concern, especially since ID
theft has become one of the fastest growing forms of crime on both
sides of the Atlantic.
© The Register
2006
