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[igotthisguitar]

Record Data Breaches In 2007
By MARK JEWELL, AP Business Writer
Sun Dec 30, 5:04 PM ET

BOSTON - The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security 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 security and laptops disappear with sensitive information.

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

"More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they're responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company's security 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.

MORE ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/data_breaches;_ylt=AvdTRrRcE93qMsF1trLk1fcDW7oF

[bassexpander]

Just got a notification from my credit card company last week that I had to create a special password for online shopping to verify my purchases. Don't know how they plan to make use of this during the transaction process??