Privacy And Information Security: What Every New Business Needs To Know

Reports of data security breaches conjure up images of anonymous computer hackers sitting in a darkened room, fingers flying over a key board in an effort to hack into a computer system to find valuable information to exploit. Not long ago, most of us considered these breaches to be infrequent and likely targeted at information much more commercially unique than the average consumer data stored by most businesses.

Data breaches have become much more commonplace over the last decade and the information being sought by the intruders is often as mundane as personal identifying information, commonly kept in many corporate databases and paper records that can be easily used for lucrative identity theft. Perhaps even more disturbing, many, if not most, data security breach incidents result not from deliberate intrusion but from carelessness, such as lost or stolen laptops and portable drives, files sent to the wrong e-mail address or mistakenly exposed to public access on