The many causes for data breaches

By Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld.com, 02/07/06

The recent spate of reported data breaches in which confidential data, such as medical or financial information, is either stolen or just simply revealed by mistake, shows the many ways things go terribly wrong.

Take the unfortunate case of the Boston Globe, which had to acknowledge it had printed sensitive data about 240,000 subscribers by mistake on the back of 9,000 routing slips used to label bundles of newspaper.

Or the Rhode Island state government Web site, hosted by New England Interactive, which was hacked by an attacker who stole 4,117 credit-card numbers. New England Interactive took the blame, saying it all happened due to an error in one line of software code.

And in yet another case that involves an insider data leak, Honeywell has accused former employee Howard Nugent, an Arizona resident, of accessing sensitve information on 19,000 Honeywell employees and then publishing it on a Web site.

And in perhaps the oddest of this lot, a Lockport, Manitoba distributor of herbal remedies, Regent RX, says it keeps getting faxed sensitive patient data from medical clinics that should be sending it to Prudential Financial's insurance group. The faxes keep coming to Regent RX, the company claims, because the toll-free fax number is almost identifical--except for one digit--to that used by Prudential.

So may ways for data to leak, we can hardly keep up with them.

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