A data thief or “data runner” is the new drug runner. Let us face the facts. It is far less dangerous for a hacker to make off with the personal information for X number of people and get paid for that data than it would be to smuggle drugs into the US. These days it is more profitable and it would be harder to prosecute. To say nothing of the fact that it would be extremely difficult for law enforcement to capture the data runner let alone have the necessary legal resources to convict.
From Seattle Times:
While companies, government agencies, schools and other institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the investment often is too little too late.
“More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they’re responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company’s security and seeing where the holes might be,” said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) after becoming an identity-theft victim herself.
Foley’s group lists more than 79 million records reported compromised in the United States through Dec. 18. That’s a nearly fourfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in all of 2006.
Damn. That’s a lot of money. Law enforcement is playing catchup with these characters.
[tags]Data Theft, Data Runner, ID Theft, Data Security[/tags]