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Incident Highlight - Total affected... who's counting?
From: lyger <lyger () attrition org>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:14:37 +0000 (UTC)
http://datalossdb.org 2008-08-23 by Lyger http://datalossdb.org/incidents/1127 There has been some discussion about the recent loss of a "memory stick" with the personal details of inmates in Great Britain. As the story above shows, it appears that about 84,000 prisoners may have been affected by this breach... or is that 94,000? Or... is that 130,000? Who knows... as bad as the British government apparently is about keeping anyone's (even prisoners) personal information safe, the media is apparently equally as bad about doing that "numbers thing". For now, DataLossDB has this particular breach listed as 94,000 total records affected until more conclusive (coherent?) data has been obtained, but at least one question should be asked: does the total number of people affected in ANY data breach really matter? It seems that breaches with a large number of people and/or records affected get more media attention, especially when a lot of zeros and commas are in the headline, but is that really any indication of the magnitude of the real problem at hand? [...] _______________________________________________ Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () attrition org) http://attrition.org/dataloss Tenable Network Security offers data leakage and compliance monitoring solutions for large and small networks. Scan your network and monitor your traffic to find the data needing protection before it leaks out! http://www.tenablesecurity.com/products/compliance.shtml
Current thread:
- Incident Highlight - Total affected... who's counting? lyger (Aug 23)
- Re: Incident Highlight - Total affected... who's counting? Al Mac Wheel (Aug 23)