An Ominous Milestone: 100 Million Data Leaks
ON Thursday, Kevin Poulsen, senior editor for Wired News, noted in his blog (blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/), a milestone in the number of records that have been compromised in data breaches since the ChoicePoint breach nearly two years ago: ?Rapid-fire announcements this week by U.C.L.A. (800,000 records) and Aetna (130,000) moved the total to the threshold, when Boeing revealed yesterday that a laptop recently stolen from an employee?s car contained names, Social Security numbers and other data on 382,000 current and former employees of the aerospace giant ? bringing the total to a grim 100,152,801 records (as of this post).?
One might at least hope that the thief in the Boeing incident was simply after the laptop, rather than the data. And the Aetna case, well, that data was stored on backup tapes that were in a lockbox, which thieves lifted ? along with DVD players, cash and other items ?in a routine burglary.
