Data breaches – always critically important to those with
responsibility for storing, transporting and protecting electronic
information – have become an all-consuming topic of late.
Stories about data theft dominate political headlines, boardroom
discussions, and family meetings around the dinner table. They, of
course, have also been the subject of government investigations and
private litigation.
The current environment is not unlike other moments in our
recent past that seemed to have captured the attention of Wall
Street, K Street and Main Street, including the financial reporting
scandals of the early 2000s. There are some important parallels
between the concerns raised by those accounting scandals involving
companies like Enron and WorldCom, and the concerns raised by data
breaches and theft today. With the accounting scandals, the
integrity of our financial markets – impacting the
institutional and retail investor alike – was at stake.
Today, data breaches
