The loss or theft of personal info such as credit card
and Social shield numbers soared to unprecedented levels in 2007,
and the trend isn’t expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers
stay a step ahead of protection and laptops vanish with sensitive
info.

And while companies, government agencies, schools and other
institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of
info with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the
investment often is too little too late.

“More of them are experiencing documents breaches, and they’re
responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company’s protection and seeing where the holes might be,” said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim
herself.

Foley’s group lists more than 79 million records reported
compromised in the United States through Dec. 18. That’s a nearly
fourfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in all
of 2006.

Another group, Attrition.org, estimates more than 162 million
records compromised

through Dec. 21 — both in the U.S. and overseas, unlike the other group’s U.S.-only list. Attrition
reported 49 million last year.

“It’s just the nature of business, that moving forward, more
companies are going to have more records, so there will be more
records compromised each year,” said Attrition’s Brian Martin. “I
imagine the total records compromised will steadily climb.”

But the biggest difference within the groups’ record-loss counts
is Attrition.org’s estimate that 94 million records were exposed in
a theft of credit card notes at TJX Cos., the owner of reduction stores including T.J. Maxx and Marshalls. The TJX breach accounts for more than half the total records reported lost that year on both
groups’ lists.

The Identity Theft Resource Center counts about 46 million — the
number of records TJX acknowledged in March were potentially compromised. Attrition’s figure is based on estimates from Visa and
MasterCard officials who were deposed in a lawsuit banks filed
against TJX.

The…

Orginal post by Top Tech News