Data Breaches in California Are On Increase

 

Data Breaches in California Are On Increase

While Data Breaches are being common in all size of Business Enterprises, Calfornia shows a rapid jump in data breach report published by State's Attorney General. The report shows that rate the data breach incident has jumped up to 18.5 Million in 2013 while in 2012 it was just 3 Million.

In 2013 the number of breaches was 167. In the previous year that number was 121. The main causes behind this rapid increase are two  mega breached that happened in Target and LivingSocial in December and April,2013 respectively.

The number of comprised data records are large in number and report says that those were the biggest in the data breach record of all time. Those two data breaches impacted 7.5Million Californians. 70 and 50 Million records were compromised in those two data breaches respectively.

In all cases Malwares has been suspected for the data breaches. Unauthorized access to Computer Systems led Millions of Personal Unencrypted data to get stolen by attackers. 

Among all the cases, stealing of Social Security Numbers tops the list.Half of the cases were reported regarding stealing of SSN. Payment Details stealing was in second with 38% rate and third position was occupied by medical information stealing with rate of 19%.

So it is hightime for every company to bring additional security features such as encrypting users' data into their day-today business. In the Report, Attorney General Kamala Harris said the same thing.

“Data breaches pose a serious threat to the privacy, finances and personal security of California consumers,” Harris said. “I strongly encourage more use of encryption to significantly reduce the risk of data breaches.”

She has asked every retailer to implement Chip-and-PIN cashing system in their business as soon as possible. The implementation of Chip-and-PIN system will take effect fully by the end of this year and every start of 2015.

Chip-and-PIN will generate a token which will be stored in retailers' network replacing  your card number. So it is needless to say that decrypting the token as well as extracting payment card details from it will be a very tough work for the hackers.

California Lay states that every company is instructed to report to the Attorney General's Office about each and every Data Breach if that breached has caused at least 500 citizens. Here are some already reported Data Breaches: DATA SECURITY BREACHES