158 Million Records Exposed (And Counting)

Lucas123 writes "According to the The Privacy Rights Clearing House 158 million records have been exposed over the past two years as a result of inadequate security. Data's less secure today because as fast as banks, merchants and consumers add new layers of security to their storage systems and networks, new technologies — or simply careless users — create new security holes, according to Bob Scheier at Computerworld."

stats on what the breaches were

[wizardforce]

http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/DataBreaches2006-A nalysis.htm [privacyrights.org] human/software incompetence took up 44% in the public sector, hackers 52% in higher education and theft(s) were 55 and 57% for private and medical respectively

Don't use personal info for identification!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your date of birth, your mother's maiden name, and miscellaneous other personal facts should be of no value to criminals. Identity theft should not be a serious problem. It is easy and cheap to construct systems that do not directly rely on personal information.

As long as brain-dead morons at financial institutions and in government insist on using personal information for identification we will have issues. This is such a flawed approach that it really is negligent.

Re:i read it somewhere else

[NMerriam]

The essential thing in the US is that the banking system has become quite enamored of easy credit in the last few decades -- the policy of extending credit to essentially anyone for any reason, based on nothing more than an application and a promise to pay it back at some later date. In a fight to get more customers for such credit, lenders competed with each other to make it as convenient as possible to apply, and therefore as convenient as possible to commit fraud. Simply knowing some easily available information about someone is enough to get you credit in their name.

So long as the creditors themselves don't suffer too much financially from fraud (which they don't, thanks to their generous campaign contributions and strict avoidance of responsibility through their merchant contracts) it's a winning business strategy because it also brings in more legitimate customers.

The fundamental problem is that we benefit from the convenience of easy credit, the banks profit from it, but when anything goes wrong all of a sudden the customer and the merchant (but not the bank) are left with all the costs of fraud. Any solution would inherently restrict the convenient availability of credit to some degree, and the American economy purrs along quite well in large part due to consumer spending that is largely tied to credit.