ABC News has published a list of 10 severe data breaches that have affected the industry in this decade beginning from 2000.

The list of data breaches has been compiled by a San Diego-based non-profit, called the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. The list includes  exhaustive list of data breaches by government agencies, institutions and corporations. Some of these incidents highlight the breaches of all kinds and including the number of people affected.

Let us analyze some of these incidents

1. 2009 — Heartland Payment Systems

   The Heartland payment systems was billed as the largest credit card crime of all time. Princeton, New Jersey based Heartland  processes card payments for restaurants and other businesses. The computers which were processing 100 million transactions for 1,75,000 merchants were penetrated by hackers. In January this year, Heartland was notified by Visa and MasterCard notified Heartland about suspicious transactions.

2. 2007 – TJX Companies

   4 years ago, the Massachusetts-based TJX informed that more than 45 million customer records in 2003 and 2004. Over $20 million were spent in investigating the incident, hiring the lawyers and notifying the customers. This incident exposes the security vulnerabilities of retailers.

3. 2009 – U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

   Information of around 76 million veterans was compromised when a defective hard drive was sent for repair and recycling without first having the data on it erased. Apparently, the hard drive contained millions of social security numbers.

4. 2005 – Card Systems

   CardSystems, an Atlanta based payment transactions processor suffered a breach incident when more than 40 million card accounts were exposed to potential fraud. Infact, the leaked details that were used by hackers belonged to Mastercard accounts (68,000), Visa accounts (100,000) and other brands (30,000).

5. 2006 – Theft of Veterans Laptop with Personal data

   Way back in May 2006, a laptop that contained personal information for millions of veterans was stolen in a burglary from the Maryland based agency. Apparently, over 17.5 million veterans were at risk and were offered to cover the cost of monitoring their credit for one year.

6. 2008 – Bank of New York Mellon

   When the Bank of New York Mellon lost a box of computer data tapes with information such as Social Security numbers, names, addresses and possibly bank account numbers, the personal information of more than 12.5 million people was compromised.As a settlement amount, Connecticut was paid $150,000 by the bank and was also promised credit monitoring and fraud alerts for the affected people for 36 months.

7. 2007 – Certegy Check Services

   A St. Petersburg, Florida-based financial services firm, Certegy revealed the theft of customer records by an employee that included credit card, bank account and other personal information. The volume estimates of the data breach incident was found out to be $ 8.5 million.

For further insights about the breach incidents, do check out the ABC News article on 10 of the Top Data Breaches of the decade.

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Related articles by Zemanta

• Top 10 Data Breaches of the Decade (abcnews.go.com)
• Heartland Slowly But Steadily Settles IT Breach Lawsuits (spectrum.ieee.org)
• Heartland settles with MasterCard for $41 million (riskpundit.com)