Network Lighthouse

It’s been a while since I’ve done any writing on InfoSec topics, but it’s my new years resolution to take it up again, so expect more articles on info sec stuff from now on.

DataBreaches.net have updated their list of the top 10 Data breaches of all time.   What I find most disturbing about the list, isn’t the volumes (although that’s still concerning), is that 4 of the top 10 were due to poor information management and/or lack of encryption.   The causes for the other breaches (such as insiders leaking information) are harder to solve, and as such a little more (not a lot though) understandable.

• National Archives (70 Million)
• Department of Veterans Affairs ( 26 Million)
• HMRC (25 Million)
• T-Mobile (17 Million)

With the exception of Veterans Affairs, all of these have occured in the last 2 years, when the use of disk/tape encryption technology came into the mainstream.  There really is no excuse for these type of breaches anymore, if companies made it standard practice to encrypt sensitive data where ever it lives, then that would mean that over the past 2 years there would have been 128 Million less records breached. That’s almost as many were revealed in the Heartland hack!

Of course the top 10 doesn’t include breaches that go unnoticed and unreported, and if you start thinking about that you start to wonder how bad the problem really is.

-Daniel