A new study suggests consumers whose credit cards are lost or stolen or whose personal information is accidentally compromised face little risk of becoming victims of identity theft.

The analysis, released late yesterday, also found that even in the most dangerous data breaches -- where thieves access Social Security numbers and other sensitive information on consumers they have deliberately targeted -- only about 1 in 1,000 victims had their identities stolen.

ID Analytics, the San Diego-based fraud-detection company that performed the analysis, said it looked at four recent data breaches involving a total of 500,000 consumers. It declined to provide the names of the companies involved in the breaches, but Mike Cook, a co-founder of ID Analytics, said one of them was a top five U.S. bank.
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