State of Massachusetts has seen the maximum number of data breaches in the past twenty months. Personal information of about two million Massachusetts residents i.e. one in every three people who are residents of Massachusetts, has been breached through electronic data breaches.
According to the 2007 state laws all companies doing business in Massachusetts must inform consumers and state regulators about security breaches that might result in identity theft. The list includes leaks of individual names along with sensitive data like Social Security numbers, bank account, credit card and debit card numbers. The law came into being in 2007 as a result of a 45 million hack of credit card numbers from Framingham-based retailer TJX Cos.
Martha Coakley, Attorney General, said that nearly 1,200 data breaches have been reported. Quarter of these were the result of intentional hacking.
The largest breach in the time period was the hacking of information of about 800,000 people that was lost by a vendor hired to destroy it. In addition, information on 210,000 residents entrusted to a state agency was put at risk.
These data breaches contained information from names and addresses to medical histories.
What MA residents had to say?
Daniel Paul, a courier, gets the jitters when he thinks about it. He made online purchases with his credit card but started getting charged for things he didn’t buy: his credit card had been hacked. It was a nightmare to get things back on track.
Here is what he had to say ”Just going through getting everything changed back, changed over, getting charges off your account, your credit– it was awful,” said Paul. ”I hope I never have to go through it again.”
Mike Paquette, Chief Strategy Officer for Corero Network Security in Hudson, MA said ”In today’s internet world there are so many opportunities where information can be disclosed, as an individual, unfortunately there is very little that you can do,”said.
Consumers do have the option of suing, but it really doesn’t get them anywhere as it is very difficult to prove data theft.
Consumers must carefully keep a track of their online transactions. It is always advisable to deal with well-known companies and do your homework about the company’s info.
Data security with Alertsec
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Encryption is the only secure method for complete protection of data stored on your hard disk. Today laptops are overtaking desktop PCs as the major source of computing and media storage, laptops frequently store an organization’s most valuable information. Thus laptop encryption is becoming more and more important.
Alertsec Xpress offers full disk encryption and is therefore superior to other encryption methods when comparing security, performance, robustness and ease-of-use for both administrators and users.
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