In the news: (more) security breaches

The ThreatStats section of the April 2012 issue of SC Magazine lists the top data breaches of the month. At the top of the list is Piedmont Behavioral Healthcare in Concord, NC with 50,000 records breached. The reason? An Alamance County employee mistakenly changed a lock on the facility that housed data servers with personal health information. Amazing how one simple mistake put the records of all those people at risk.

Next is the St. Joseph Health System in California with 31,800 records breached. It seems that protected patient information from several hospitals may have been available on the Internet for one year. Again, unbelievable!

The last one is Central Connecticut State University with 18,763 records breached. The reason listed is a malware infestation exposed the information of current and former faculty, staff, and student workers.

Another staggering statistic is the total number of records containing sensitive personal information involved in security beaches in the U.S. since January 2005: 544,669,041!

SC Magazine lists the source of this information as the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (data from a service provided by DataLossDB.org hosted by the Open Security Foundation).

Don’t add yourself to this list. To learn how you can prevent network breaches from unauthorized network connections and out-of-compliance devices, take at look at Black Box’s Veri-NAC®.

For easy WAN encryption with no VPN tunnels, take a look at EncrypTight®.

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