Tag Archives: California

Data Breaches on the Rise in California

The annual California Data Breach Report has indicated that the number of data breaches that occurred in California in 2013 has increased from 131 cases in 2012 to 167 cases in 2013. What is more staggering is that the actual number of people affected by the data breaches increased by 600% during the same period. As a result, over 18.5 million people were actually affected by the data breaches.

California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, believes that the current statistics are troubling for the California State as in 2012, 17% of the total number of data breaches to occur in the United States happened in California.

Harris stated, “With the world’s eighth largest economy and more than 38 million consumers, California is uniquely impacted by data breaches. In 2012, 17% of the data breaches recorded in the United States took place in California – more than any other state. Even more troubling, the number of reported breaches in California increased by 28% in 2013.”

The retail sector accounted for the largest number of data breaches (26%) which were followed by the finance and insurance sector (20%) and the healthcare sector at (15%). In 2013, malware and hacking contributed to 53% of total breaches to occur within the Californian state whilst physical loss or theft of storage and computing devices containing unencrypted data made up 26% of the total data breached. Unintentional misuse and deliberate misuse by insiders contributed 18% and 4% respectively.

The retail sector has significantly contributed to the overall statistics, mainly thanks to the two large data breaches that affected Target and LivingSocial customers. These two incidents can also be contributed to the huge increase in the number of people affected.

Such statistics show the importance of ensuring that data is stored in a secure format. Kamala Harris has urged the state’s retailers to utilise chip-enabled point-of-sale (POS) systems and encryption after large amounts of customer data was compromised during a stage where it remained in its raw format.

UPS Customer Data Compromised

United Parcel Service (UPS) which is one of the largest shipment and logistics companies in the world has become one of the latest high profile companies to suffer a data breach.

UPS confirmed that they have suffered a data breach which has compromised data from around 105,000 customer transactions between January and August from 51 of its stores. Such stores that were affected are located in 24 U.S. states including New York, California and Texas.

UPS has confirmed that the data breach occurred due to malicious software being installed on their systems that has resulted on confidential data such as credit or debit card data, customer names and postal address being compromised.

Tim Davis who is the president of the UPS store stressed that as soon as they became aware of the data breach; the threat was contained and eliminated as quickly as possible.

Davis stated, “As soon as we became aware of the potential malware intrusion, we deployed extensive resources to quickly address and eliminate this issue. Our customers can be assured that we have identified and fully contained the incident.”

UPS have stated that they will not be notifying customers on an individual basis as they do not have all of the cardholder data. Therefore the emphasis has been places on UPS customers to check the UPS Store Inc.’s website to see if they have previously shopped at one of the affected UPS stores.

UPS has been keen to stress that so far, there has been no evidence of fraud because of the data breach.

UPS are the latest high profile company to have suffered a data breach which shows that it is now as important to ever to ensure security procedures and plans are in place and regularly tested and updated.

Supporting this, due to the increased threat from cyber thieves, it is now vital that all confidential data is also backed up with a robust backup solution to ensure that data can be recovered to the desired state if it is deleted or modified.

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