Protecting Customer Data: Grappling With Lost Data, Broken Trust

By force of numbers alone, this year is going to be remembered for a long time as the moment when it became stunningly obvious that customer data is anything but secure. This raises the question: just how much of an effect on customer trust have these security breaches had?

It's true that hacking, identity theft (at some 160,000 incidents last year, according to TowerGroup, notwithstanding plain credit card fraud, which federal figures peg at about 10 million a year), and data loss have been known quantities for quite some time-and that one could fill an Adirondack reservoir with all the ink that's been spilled over phishing attacks in the last two years. But in the space of eight months, more than 45 million accounts have been compromised (the bulk of them from card processor CardSystems), enough to cause red faces at some of the world's largest financial organizations and prompt hearings on Capitol Hill.

While, as yet, these security breaches have not led to a large, directly attributable number of identity thefts or fraud cases, they've come bunched closely enough together to gain public attention and turn information security departments on their ears. As with the rolling thunder of scandal along Wall Street during the past four years, what's ultimately at stake is not cash, or new regulations, or technology. It's trust.