They make the news on a regular basis: incidents in which a company or government agency's security is breached, leading to a loss of information, personal records, or other data. There are many ways to measure the size or cost of a security breach. Some result in the loss of millions of data records, some affect millions of people, and some wind up costing the affected businesses a lot of money. Not to mention, the questions of you calculate the value of personal medical information vs. credit

Jake Widman, Contributor

March 10, 2011

11 Slides


The amount of data actually lost by the Akron Children's Hospital in 2008 wasn't great, but the story's too good to leave out. In February of that year, a man sent an email with spyware to his ex-girlfriend, hoping to monitor what she did on her computer. Unfortunately for him (and the hospital), she opened the email on her work computer. Over the course of ten days, the spyware emailed the miscreant more than a thousand screenshots of confidential data on 62 patients. The man agreed to pay $33,000 to the hospital and faced a five-year prison sentence.

See Also

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Schwartz On Security: First, Know You've Been Breached

100,000 Credit Cards Compromised By Data Breach

Gawker Details Missteps Behind Security Breach

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