10 Massive Security Breaches
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
In February 2007, TJX, parent company of discount stores T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, disclosed that thieves had stolen information on possibly tens of millions of credit and debit cards. The company first thought its systems had been compromised for about eight months, but it turned out the vulnerability might have lasted for almost a year longer than that. The incident wound up costing TJX millions of dollars paid to the FTC, credit card companies, banks, and consumers. Oh, and 11 hackers were eventually arrested for the break-in.
Security breaches have only increased in scope and frequency in recent years, as more businesses store their data in digital files and thieves become increasingly sophisticated in how they gain access to those files. But sometimes the attacks aren't sophisticated at all -- sometimes they just occur because someone got careless with a physical object. That's old-school data theft, no hacking required.
See Also
Nasdaq Confirms Servers Breached
Two Arrested For AT&T iPad Network Breach
Schwartz On Security: First, Know You've Been Breached
In June 2005, MasterCard announced that up to 40 million credit card holders were at risk of having their data stolen -- and 200,000 definitely had -- because of a Trojan on the computers of a credit card processing company. The processor, CardSystems Solutions, had improperly stored the card data, unencrypted, in order to do research on the transactions. The CardSystems chief executive admitted: "We should not have been doing that."
Heartland was a credit card payment processor for more than 250,000 businesses in 2009, when the company revealed that tens of millions of transactions might have been compromised. The company's computers were infected with malware that passed the information on to outsiders, information that would enable the thieves to create counterfeit cards with actual user data. The company claimed that Social Security information, PIN numbers, and other personal data were not affected.
In one of the instances of a physical security breach rather than an electronic one, the Bank of New York Mellon simply lost a tape. In February 2008, the company sent 10 unencrypted backup tapes to a storage facility. When the storage firm's truck arrived at the facility, however, only nine tapes were still on board. The missing tape contained social security numbers and bank account information on 4.5 million customers. Oops.
The Maine-based grocery store chain Hannaford Brothers announced in March 2008 that hackers had gained access to more than 4.2 million credit card transactions. By the time word got out, more than 1,800 of the credit card numbers had already been used at company stores in the Northeast and Florida. Ironically, the chain had passed a PCI assessment not long before the breach was discovered. The breach resulted in two class action lawsuits on behalf of customers, whose outcome is still pending.
News broke in November 2007 that two computer discs holding personal information on 25 million British citizens -- all UK families with children under 16 -- had been lost in the mail. The data included the families' names, addresses, National Insurance number, and in some cases bank information. The discs had been sent by courier via the HMRC's internal mail system, and the agency initially tried to blame a worker for not following procedure. The worker argued that sending such packages that way was common, and soon other incidents of data lost the same way were revealed.
In 2009, the Department of Veterans Affairs was having trouble with one of the hard drives in a database RAID array. So, naturally, the agency sent the drive out for repair. Unfortunately, it neglected to erase the unencrypted data on the disc. When the contractor was unable to repair the disc, they simply recycled it -- again without erasing -- leaving the personal information for some 76 million veterans accessible to whoever next got the disc.
Certegy Check Services, a subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Service, revealed in 2007 that one of its employees had been stealing customer records and selling them to a data broker. The records included credit card, bank account, and other personal information, and Certegy estimated the breach affected 8.5 million customers. The thief got jail time and a multimillion-dollar fine, and Certegy wound up out nearly $1,000,000 in donations and court costs.
Somebody at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services left the office in April 2009 with a laptop containing unencrypted client records. They left the laptop in their car, someone broke into the car, and the names, social security numbers, and other sensitive information on about a million Oklahomans went missing. While the data was unencrypted, the laptop itself was password-protected, so the agency deemed the risk of data loss "low."
In May 2009, the Connecticut health care provider Health Net reported that an unencrypted portable storage device was missing, containing seven years' worth of financial and medical information on 1.5 million customers. The capper? The device actually went missing six months before the company reported it. The Connecticut attorney general promptly filed suit. Health Net settled for $250,000 and is on the hook for another $500,000 if any of the data is accessed and misused before November 30, 2011.
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.
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.
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
Nasdaq Confirms Servers Breached
Two Arrested For AT&T iPad Network Breach
Schwartz On Security: First, Know You've Been Breached
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