Posted on | March 10, 2008 | add a comment
Massive data losses did not stop after TJX lost 94 million of its customers credit card recordsâ€â€data that became rapidly distributed to criminal cells around the world. Chapter 16 of ZDT takes you deep into the world of Irving Escobar, AKA the Venezuelan. One minute Irving was a 19-year-old kid with too much idle time, the next he was taking orders from a mysterious ring leader, El Flaco (the Skinny One), and leading a subcell of operatives assigned to convert stolen TJX credit card account numbers into $1 million worth of Wal-Mart gift cards, which are as good as cash.
A quick look at attrition.org’s data base of loss and stolen records shows 54 companies and agencies reporting smaller scale data losses this year, on pace to eclipse the 300-plus publicly- reported data loss incidents in 2007.
The folks at Guardium point out that the average cost of a compromised customer record was $197 in 2007, compared to $182 in 2006, according to the Ponemon Institute. Guardium makes a good argument that it is cost effective for companies and organizations to invest data protection than data cleanup.
The market apparently agrees: the database security company tells me it doubled its installed base last year, signing up clients such as ChoicePoint, the FTC and Wyndham International. Guardium blocks, tracks and reports anomalous database activity in real time. It has the largest deployment base of any product in its class and is being used by top companies in the most security-award industries.
Says CEO Ram Metser: “More Global 1000 organizations trust Guardium – the pioneer in data security for the data center – to safeguard their critical enterprise data than any other technology provider. Data security is now the top concern for CIOs and CSOs and we are experiencing rapid growth in global demand for our data protection solutions.â€Â
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