Re: Universities riskiest place for SSN

[Mike Lococo <mike.lococo () NYU EDU>]

On 11/08/2010 02:32 PM, Eric Case wrote:
> The original post,
> http://blogs.mcafee.com/consumer/identity-theft/top-ten-most-dangerous-place
> s-to-leave-your-social-security-number, says, "Robert Siciliano, on behalf
> of McAfee,  analyzed data breaches published by the Identity Theft Resource
> Center, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Open Security Foundation that
> involved Social Security number breaches from January 2009 - October 2010 to
> reveal the riskiest places to lose your ID."
>
> It is unclear if they ranked by number of records/breach or number of
> breaches.

My read is that the number in parens at the end of each top-10 entry is
a breach-count (it's certainly not a record-count), which is used as the
ranking/sorting key.  Since the data is from a report covering
2009-2010, it's fairly recent.

If one is looking for a methodology flaw that excuses Higher-Ed's
number-one spot on the list, it's probably the failure to account for
our culture of openness.  You don't see other industries announcing a
breach and then saying "there was no evidence of unauthorized access,
but we're calling this a breach and announcing it anyway", which is
fairly common from higher-ed institutions.  We might get dwarfed on
record count as-well, but that you can't see that data without buying
the original report.

Cheers,
Mike Lococo