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No doubt about it, 2007 was the year that high-profile data breaches made headlines.
TJX kicked off '07 with the largest data breach in history: a whopping 45.7 million records lifted when hackers infiltrated the company's network over a period of 18 months. Other large-scale losses—such as a phishing scam at a military research lab and the loss of two unencrypted United Kingdom government disks—followed in its wake.
And experts say this is just the tip of the iceberg. Since January 2005, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has identified more than 215 million records belonging to U.S. residents that have been compromised due to a security breach. Plus, a recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute determined that the total average costs for exposed data grew to $197 per compromised record, representing an increase of 8 percent since 2006 and 43 percent since 2005.
"You lose 10 million records, it gets really expensive, really quick," said John Dasher, director of product management at Palo Alto, Calif.-based PGP Corp., a data protection company. "That's really staggering if you think about it."
To say the least, businesses, from the largest companies to the smallest shops, are still reeling from the effects. We can expect to see significant changes within companies as to how they protect data and deal with its loss in 2008, according to experts.
"One of the things that makes data leak prevention so significant is that it's so hard to do. There's always a way around any defense you can think of," said Richard Stiennon, chief marketing officer at Fortinet Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. "It's a problem without an ultimate solution."
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SMB Sales Still A Sore Spot In The Channel SMB sales struggled more than enterprise sales for many distributors and VARs in the second quarter, while public sector sales remained a rare bright spot. Here's a look at 10 channel companies' sales performance for the June quarter, ranked from the biggest decline to the smallest. |
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