According to a recent study from the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and information management research firm, incidents involving the loss of personally identifiable customer information (Data Breaches) cost U.S. companies $202 per compromised customer record in 2008. Within that number, the largest cost increase in 2008 concerns lost business created by abnormal churn, meaning turnover of customers. Since the study's inception in 2005, this cost component has grown by more than $64 on a per victim basis, nearly a 40% increase.

Ponemon’s annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study tracks a wide range of cost factors, including expensive outlays for detection, escalation, notification and response along with legal, investigative and administrative expenses, customer defections, opportunity loss, reputation management, and costs associated with customer support such as information hotlines and credit monitoring subscriptions.

Here are some recent incidents from just this year alone where the sensitive data of a business or organization has been lost or stolen due to a lack of adequate security systems. These incidents put these businesses and organizations at serious risk of being subject to fines, lawsuits, and bankruptcy:

• Names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers of roughly 28,000 state retirees were e-mailed to the Kentucky Retirement Systems (KY) without being properly encrypted for security purposes by its pharmacy benefit provider.
• The University of Florida (FL) discovered that a server was accessed by an unauthorized intruder from outside UF. This server contained an unencrypted file with names and Social Security Numbers for 97,200 people.
• The United Way of Miami-Dade’s (FL) computer system was hacked. The computer system contained personal information including credit card information.
• AES (NH), the service provider for Student Loan Xpress, transmitted names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, and dates of birth to another student loan lender with which AES contracts without being encrypted.
• A former employee of Occidental Petroleum Corporation in Tulsa (OK) "accessed and mishandled" personal information by emailing a spreadsheet containing information on former employees to a personal email account. The former employees’ data included names, addresses, birthdates, employee identification numbers, starting dates, retirement dates, and Social Security numbers.
• A former employee of building materials supplier Lehigh Hanson (NH) downloaded data after his termination. The downloaded data included files with employee payroll information of current and former employees.

Are you doing everything that you can to protect your business from the catastrophe that will come from the theft or loss of its personally identifiable information (PI)? Noonmark Technology’s Secure Web File Sharing System can help your business to protect its PI. The system controls and monitors access to PI, automatically deletes PI based on data retention policies that you set, and encrypts PI while in transit across the Internet and in storage as well.