US/GLOBAL World Information Access Project » 6 Million Personal Records Compromised Each Month; 2 Billion in Total by December?: "6 Million Personal Records Compromised Each Month; 2 Billion in Total by December?
Categories: Economics

The computer hacker is one of the most vilified figures in the digital era, but to what degree are organizations actually responsible for compromised personal records? To examine the role of organizational behavior in privacy violations, we analyze 589 incidents of compromised data between 1980 and 2006.

In the United States, some 1.9 billion records have been exposed, either through poor management or hacker intrusions: about nine personal digital records compromised for every adult. There were more reported incidents in 2005 and 2006 than in the previous 25 years combined, and while businesses have long been the primary organizations hemorrhaging personal records, colleges and universities are increasingly implicated.

Excluding a particularly large security breach at Acxiom, hackers account for the largest volume of compromised records, some 45 percent, while 27 percent of the volume is attributed to organizational mismanagement and 28 remains unattributed.