| Survey: US firms lose laptops with sensitive data |
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Eighty-one percent of companies surveyed reported the loss of one or more laptops containing sensitive information during the past 12 months, according to the survey, which queried nearly 500 information security professionals.
One of the main reasons corporate data security breaches occur is because companies don't know where their sensitive or confidential business information resides within the network or enterprise systems, Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, said in a statement.
“This lack of knowledge, coupled with insufficient controls over data stores, can pose a serious threat for both business and governmental organizations,” Ponemon said. “Moreover, the danger doesn't stop at the network, but includes employees' and contractors' laptop computers and other portable storage devices.”
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| Privacy Debacle Hall of Fame |
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Earlier this month AOL publicly released a data trove: 500,000 search queries culled from three months of user traffic on its search engine.
This may have been one of the dumbest privacy debacles of all time, but it certainly wasn't the first. Here are ten other privacy snafus that made the world an unsafer place. Despite the obvious flaws of rankings, we have attempted one as follows, in descending order:
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| Yahoo adds phishing shield |
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Yahoo is testing a new security feature that lets users customize their login page, a measure designed to thwart information-thieving phishing scams.
The feature requires people to create a unique "sign-in seal" on a specific PC. This seal--a text message or photo--will be displayed on the Yahoo login page when visited with that computer, according to a description of the feature on Yahoo's Web site.
But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines -- and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data.
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