Let’s begin with a case of a deliberate data leak incident, in which the judge’s gavel has already fallen. The former vice-president of The Commercial Bank in Meridian misused identities of an unspecified number of clients to apply for loans in their names. The criminal would later convert her ill-gained funds into checks or she would withdraw the money in cash. She was sentenced to imprisonment of 4.25 years, and she also has to pay $240.000 to the victims of the fraud.

Medicaid in South Carolina has disclosed that one of its employees had sent sensitive data of 228.000 clients to a personal email account. The affected clients were all entitled to Medicaid benefits related to health condition or social status. What is more, Emory University Hospital in Atlanta has newly realized it misses ten backup drives on which the data of 315.000 patients is stored. In total, May has seen over 600.000 sensitive records deliberately stolen, and that’s still only the cases that got reported.

Desert AIDS Project, an HIV/AIDS services provider, has learnt the hard way not to underestimate encryption of local devices. One of their offices was burgled and a PC with unencrypted data of 2200 AIDS patients disappeared.

It is vital to incorporate data security into outsourcing contracts – this is the lesson a customer of PricewaterhouseCoopers had to learn when he lost track of the data regarding his employees and their wages. How? An auditor from the above mentioned company used the postal service to transport an unencrypted USB device on which the sensitive data was stored.

Nevertheless, the state of Texas is, without any doubt, this month’s champion in data leak. Social security numbers of 13 million Texas citizens had been missent. Fortunately, the person who received the information did not misuse it, and so no harm was sustained. Interestingly enough, this incident reminds us of another data leak which occurred one year ago, again in Texas. In April 2011, sensitive data of 3.5 million Texas residents leaked out because of insufficient security measures applied to a computer in the Texas comptroller’s office.

Learn how to prevent data breach and get familiar with factors you should consider here: http://www.safetica.com/safetica/get-protection

Sources:datalossdb.org, 7thspace.com, newstalkradiowhio.com, lonestarproject.net, mysanantonio.com