100 Million Victims of Data Theft

jcatcw writes "With the latest significant data breach — theft of a Boeing laptop with unencrypted personal information on 382,000 employees — the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimates that the total number of data breach victims has passed 100 million since they started tracking in February 2005. The director, Beth Givens, admits 'the number 100 million is largely a fictional number,' but it surely errs on the low side. Since California is still the only state with disclosure laws, incidents are difficult to analyze fully. However, Congress this week passed a bill requiring that the Department of Veterans Affairs report breaches."

Comments

I don't trust the article

[BadAnalogyGuy]

How can you trust the article when they make the outlandish claim that Boeing makes laptops. They make airplanes, silly.

We need to think how transactions are processed

[rolfwind]

Right now, it's becoming clear to me that the problem is that the weak chain in the link is that the creditors/banks/etcetera consistently rely on a few lines of data to complete transactions and identify the parties involved, 95% of which is publicly available, the other 5% easily stolen.

I don't know what to do to solve this, any suggestions?

(Way back when, my friend who worked at a Sam Goody used to actually check credit cards when customers bought something on his first day on the job. After the manager caught wind that he denied someone using their friend's mom's credit card, supposedly with permission, he got yelled at and told not to do it again. I can't help but think that the laws are too lax in this area and the industry has little interest fixing it.)

Re:We need to think how transactions are processed

[Ajehals]

This is an old problem - the banks / merchants etc... want to make it easy enough for you to spend your money or to get credit that you do it on a regular basis. If banks decided to make it harder - in order to increase their / your security / privacy then it means that they lose business, especially if they are the first to do it. Basically they don't mind losing a bit of money to make a lot of money.

Of course as long as its easy to get hold of your cash or get credit, someone will want to exploit that to get hold of cash or credit in your name. So making it harder to commit fraud or identity theft is really only beneficial to the customer, which in turn means that the only path to making it harder to commit fraud or identity theft is to introduce legislation or regulation to make it happen. That of course is opposed by the banks and merchants (as they lose out) and opposed by the majority of customers as they don't see that there is a problem until it happens to them.

So yeah, apart from not seeing an easy solution for the banks and merchants, I also don't really see a will to implement any solution which decreases the amount of spending or credit applications, or one that will cost money to roll out (after all most organisations are looking at short term profit not long term strategy's).

Re:We need to think how transactions are processed

[bluefoxlucid]

I solved this problem ages ago. Some guy, actually two of them, invented something called the Diffie-Hellman Public Key Encryption Algorithm. Since then we've had dozens of these show up and now have RSA and DSA/ElGamal out there. Pretty much, with huge (1024 byte!) challenges and hardware devices with your key in them, as well as transferable One Time Pads (so you can let someone else use your credit card once, twice, for $5, for $10...), you can make it so everyone along the way can verify your identity and nobody along the way can pretend to be you.

The system drawn out isn't that complex. It's lazy distributed too; anyone can cache your public key, so anyone can independently verify you over and over again. This means that the store can verify your card isn't a spoofer and not pester the credit card company with it if it is; and if it's not, then the credit card company can also verify your card isn't a spoofer (and that the store isn't sliding in extra charges after you've signed for the price) and not pester the national PKI network with it.

100 million.. six months ago!

[anilg]

That according to http://attrition.org/dataloss/rant/100million.html

The Data Loss Database - Open Source has almost 510 events and over 143 MILLION compromised records as of this writing. 100 million? Dudes and dudettes, we had that over six months ago.

From TFA

[AlanS2002]

Yeah, there's that problem; and also the fact that it is 100M known victims of identity theft.

From the article: "A stolen laptop at The Boeing Co. has pushed a widely watched tally of U.S. data breach victims past the 100 million mark". Saying that the 100M people are thought to have had data disclosed about them is not the same as saying that 100M people are known victims of identity theft.

I was counted twice!

[Aphoric]

I have been counted at least twice though. I am a veteran and got a letter from the VA with a previous theft, and that was just a few months after I got a letter from Boeing telling me that my info was stolen. Have not heard anything about this latest one, I do appreciate the free credit monitoring I get now, but I am not convinced it would do me any good if someone was really using my info. Plus it is only for one year, that is a relatively short period of time, the info has an unlimited life.

Re:kill me, Slashdot, for I haven't the nerve myse

[poopdeville]

I realize this is probably a troll, but I'm responding in case it isn't.

It isn't too late. But you have a tough choice to make. You can either choose to make your life better, or choose to let life push you around. Changing is not easy.

Read Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche.

Pull your ethernet cable, unplug your wireless router. Take some time off of the /b/ scene. Get out of town for a while if you can.

Think about your goals -- both the failed and incomplete. Ask yourself why the failed ones failed. Resolve to fix the problems that caused them to fail. Evaluate your incomplete goals. Make plans to finish them. Commit to your plans.

Exercise is good for you. I don't mean to make fun of your belly. But you obviously need to become stronger to become the man you want to be.

Don't sweat being bald.

You've wasted a lot of time, but you're still young. There's no point wasting any more.

For the love of God...

[RulerOf]

Two words: Terminal Server.

I know it has been asked before, but WHY in the name of GOD does this kind of information need to be on a fucking laptop?!

My mother works at a VA hospitol and as such, has access to read and modify all the personal information necessary to commit identity theft on thousands of patients, and of course, she has a laptop computer issued by the hospitol so that she can work from afar. When she originally received it, it was nothing more than a Win2k box with VPN software, MS terminal services. All of the sensitive data was/is stored on the servers on their intranet. After a small "upgrade," the laptop was returned, only this time it came back with a full encryption setup. The interesting thing is that there is STILL no sensitive data stored on the laptop. It is, however, just as easily accessible. The point is, if someone stole that laptop, no sensitive data would be compromised, even if the encryption was broken (which probably wouldn't happen).

I don't fucking understand, why when we have the technology READILY available to completely prevent this kind of crap, that it isn't used. A shout out to all the companies on this planet: Centralize your damned security. Laptops cost $500. This kind of shit publicity and potential lawsuits cost a hell of a lot more.