The Biggest Threat to Business and Economy is Lax Cyber Security

Just another in a long list of information security breeches.

Insurance provider American International Group has confirmed the theft of a file server and other hardware that held the personal information of approximately 970,000 potential customers.

Company officials said an intruder entered one of its Midwest offices sometime after business hours in late March and walked off with a file server and other equipment, including several laptop computers, that held the data in question.

Why are companies so careless with our data?

The AIG data loss is just the latest in a long string of high-profile incidents in which well-known companies have mishandled customer information.

Most recently, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs admitted that it had exposed the personal information of up to 26.5 million veterans when a computer was taken from an employee's home.

Other recent breaches have been reported by a regional office of the YMCA and travel site Hotels.com.

A new study from researchers at Gartner indicates that it is markedly less expensive for companies to invest in new security and encryption technologies than it is for them to respond to a data breach.

According to the analyst firm, businesses pay roughly $6 per year per user for encryption tools, or $16 per user per year for intrusion prevention software licenses, versus paying out an average of $90 per user to address problems after a breach has occurred.

Is there a trend happening here? If the bandits stole just $1,000 from each identity theft victim the total would equal $970,000,000 Almost $1 billion dollars. Is this bothersome to anyone else? Give me your thoughts.