Log in

Posts Tagged ‘business’

Key findings from the Computer Theft survey

August 6th, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

The main concern while running a business is keeping your computing devices like desktops, laptops etc. and their data secure. The portability offered by laptops, increases their chance of being stolen as people are constantly leaving them unattended at public places. Many a times these devices are left behind at restaurants, subways, coffee shops, airports etc. Although the insurance company may cover the hardware, the files and data on the machine may eventually be untraceable and forever lost.

Recently BSI carried out their 8^th Annual Computer Theft Survey in the United States. Here are the key findings from that survey:

More than 5.5 Million computers were stolen in the United States in the last 3 years.
More than half (58.7%) of the respondents have been a victim of computer theft in the last year.
According to FBI, 97% of unprotected computers (i.e. computers that do not use any data encryption software or computer security software) are never recovered.
68% of the devices stolen were laptops, followed by desktops (10%) & others like PDA’s, iphone etc. (22%)
67% of computer theft occurred while respondent was mobile (moving about),
91% of respondents did not use data encryption software to encrypt the proprietary data on their stolen device.
Average total replacement cost of each stolen computing device was $43,264.66.
71% of respondents reported downtime due to computer theft ranging from several days to more than a month.
Only 21% of those surveyed used extensive data protection like dedicated data encryption software, but about 70% did not use any safeguard or security protection at all.

These numbers are very similar to the numbers in the surveys done earlier on this issue, clearly indicating that people are not doing anything more to protect their data than they were doing earlier.

If you carefully analyze the survey data, you will notice that only 3% of stolen computing devices are recovered; even then only 9% people are using data encryption software to protect their data.

Encrypt your Data for peace of mind!

We spend huge sums to protect our internal networks, but forget that there are people carrying laptops that are connected to these internal networks. These laptops are equally vulnerable to theft & hacking. This fact has been highlighted in the survey, according to which 67% of computer thefts occurred when the respondent was outdoors.

By using laptop encryption software, we could have greatly enhanced the laptop security as there is no way that the information is compromised if the laptop is lost or stolen. A theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop.

Secure your data using Alertsec

Alertsec Xpress offers computer security software from Check Point as a fully customizable and pre-packaged data encryption software solution. The AES encryption algorithm and extensive 3rd party certifications offer you security that is used by millions. Try it for free today.

Why Use Data Encryption? (brighthub.com)
Identity Theft in Laptops (socyberty.com)

1 comment »

Posted in AlertSec Xpress, Data Protection

Tags: Advanced Encryption Standard business Cryptography Encryption Federal Bureau of Investigation file encryption security United States

Data Breach Report 2010 by ITRC

July 3rd, 2010

The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) has released a data breach statistics report for 2010 for all incidents that involved data breach till June 22,2010.

Apparently, the year has already witnessed 325 incidents which has lead to the exposure of 8.3 million recosrds. This number definitely indicates that the overall incidents for they year 2010 will exceed the cases that had happened in 2009. The reported incidents in 2009 were 498.

While the Business industry had accounted 208 of the total incidents in 2009, this year the number has already reached 121 incidents. In 2009, the cases reported from the Government/Military sector were 2009, while this year they have already reached 54.

The most surprising of all the categories is the Banking sector. While last year (2009) there were ‘57′ standing at 11.4% of the total breaches. This year inside 6 months, while the number has grown to ‘37′ the percentage of incidents has dropped to 11.1%.

Once again – The report highlights a key and an alarming fact. 41.8% of the stories have been reported from the business vertical.

Statistical reports like these are a fair lesson for organizations to implement proper security policies in place. Not only do the organizations need to be proactive they also need to take appropriate measures to encrpy data, implement computer security software, data enryption methods etc.

Data Security with Alertsec Xpress

If you use a data security software a theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or senstive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.

Data Breaches up in 2008 (braintreepaymentsolutions.com)
Stop Trying to be Me (Identity Theft) (socyberty.com)

No comments »

Posted in AlertSec Xpress, Identity and Information loss

Tags: business Computer security Crime data breach data security identity theft insurance security Statistics Theft

SMBs Worried about Data Losses

June 25th, 2010

Computer software security and data encryption are two vital areas that organizations cannot afford to ignore. Symantec has released a new survey according to which over many small and medium sized businesses are worried about the cyber attacks and data loss incidents.

According to Symantec’s 2010 Global SMB Information Protection Survey around 2000 SMBs in 28 countries were surveyed. The respondents belonged to the following two groups:

Small Businesses (Employees 10-99)
Medium Sized Businesses (Employees 100 -499) » Read more: SMBs Worried about Data Losses

No comments »

Posted in Symantec Data Protection

Tags: Apple business Check Point Computer security Mobile device security Small business Symantec

Top Data Breach Incidents

June 19th, 2010

: Data Security Breaches

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

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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.

Security against Data Breach with Alertsec Xpress

Why do data breach incidents happen in the first place? Perhaps your organization didn’t take the requisite steps or there was some level of negligence with the handling of data.

If you use a data security software a theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or senstive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.

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)

No comments »

Posted in Data Protection, data breach

Tags: business computer security software Credit card data breach data security Financial services Heartland Payment Systems Mastercard Merchant Services TJX Companies Visa

Digital River Data Breach Incident

June 9th, 2010

When hackers executed a “highly unusual search command” against Digital River’s secured servers the data belonging to almost 200,000 individuals was exposed leading to massive data security breach.

Direct Response Technologies which is a Pittsburgh based subsidiary of Digital River sells a leading software program called as DirectTrack. With DirectTrack companies can create and manage affiliate marketing programs. Once the data is gathered by the programs it is stored on Digital River’s servers, and access to it is tightly restricted with passwords and other security measures.

It was when 19-year-old Eric Porat of Brooklyn tried to sell the purloined data for as much as $500,000, the investigators got hold of him.On being questioned, Porat has also said that he has obtained the information from India, but hasn’t revealed how he has got the same. According to Digital River the information was apparently stolen by New Delhi hackers with some level of support from a contractor working for Digital River.

According to reports Eric Porat had approached a company called Media Breakaway and had made repeated requests to them for buying the information. His idea was to sell the data to the highest bidder.

This type of data is very helpful for organizations that are interested in targeted marketing activities. The crucial data included names, email addresses, websites, and unique user-identification numbers for 198,398 individuals. The data was collected by affiliated marketing companies through a software created by Direct Response Technologies (Digital River subisidary) and was stored on password-protected servers.

Digital River Marketing Solutions Inc. has filed the lawsuit on May 13 listing Porat and his company, Affiliads, as defendants seeking information on how they obtained Digital River’s data and what they’ve done with it.

Data Security with Alertsec Xpress

If you use a data security software a theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or senstive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.