Data breaches up, but not in government sector

Reported data breaches increased sharply in the first six months of 2008, jumping 69 percent compared to the same period last year, according to a study by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). But the percentage of breaches occurring in the government sector has dropped steadily in the past three years.

ITRC, a nonprofit organization that supports victims of identity theft, collected reports of 342 breaches of personal information that potentially exposed 16.8 million records in the first half of the year. Its findings are detailed in the  2008 Breach Report. The organization said it was an all-time high for reported breaches in a six-month period, and much of the exposed data was in electronic formats.

But improvements in data security by government organizations appear to be making a difference, said Jay Foley, ITRC’s executive director. The government accounted for 30 percent of all breaches in 2006, which dropped to 25 percent last year and just 17 percent in the first half of this year. The largest offender so far this year was business (excluding financial services), which accounted for nearly 37 percent of breaches.

“It looks like government is stepping up and making more efforts to control the data,” Foley said. “But we won’t know until the end of the year where we’re at.”

Breaches at banking and financial services companies have been slowly increasing — from 8 percent in 2006 to 10 percent so far this year — but they are still at the bottom of the list. That figure reflects the strong regulations and security controls in the industry, Foley added.

Researchers culled the report’s findings from ITRC’s breach database, which gathers reports of incidents of exposed data that could be used for identity theft. The information is gathered from verified media reports and some state offices that maintain breach notification lists. Not all of the data was stolen, and not all of it has been used in identity fraud.

“I would say the predominant portion of this is from screw-ups, and the lesser amount is theft,” Foley said. In other words, more personal data is being exposed due to carelessness than hacking.

The most common type of breach was the theft or loss of a laptop PC, thumb drive, personal digital assistant or other portable device. They accounted for 20 percent of incidents. Hacking was responsible for 12 percent, and exposure through inadvertent posting on a Web site accounted for 15 percent.