| The business of securing our private data is becoming more important and more relevant
each day.The benefits of electronic communication come with proportionate
risks. Critical business systems can be and are compromised regularly, and are used
for illegal purposes.There are many instances of this: Seisint (Lexis-Nexis research),
Choicepoint, Bank of America, PayMaxx, DSW Shoe Warehouses,Ameriprise, and
T-Mobile are all recent examples.
■ Seisint (Lexis-Nexis research) was hacked, potentially compromising names,
addresses, and social security and driver’s license information relating to
310,000 people.
■ Choicepoint, one of the nation’s largest information aggregators, allowed
criminals to buy the private identity and credit information of more than
150,000 customer accounts. Besides the harm done to Choicepoint’s reputation,
in late January, 2006, Choicepoint was fined $15 million by the FTC
for this breach.This figure does not include the millions of dollars spent by
Choicepoint on the cleanup of this debacle.This settlement makes it clear
that the FTC is increasingly willing to escalate security-related enforcement
actions. |
