Planet Mars, Curiosity, And Data Security

Author:Mr Francois Lesieur (Articling Student)
Profession:Cozen O'Connor



Before going to war against Iraq for the second time, thousands of Iraqi military officers received tailored e-mails on the secret Iraqi Defense Ministry e-mail system, causing many Iraqi officers and their troops to go on "leave of absence" before the U.S. started its own cruise missile campaign. In other words, be it controlling ideologies and political thinking or monopolizing sectors of the market through information asymmetry, behind every data breach there is the potential for a greater harm than that which is often spoken of in the media. In short, data breaches have the potential of affecting core democratic institutions; privacy is the only protective layer.

Causes for data breaches have been attributed to malicious attacks, negligent insiders, system glitches, and lost, stolen, or compromised technologies such as USB keys, laptops, cloud services, mobile phones, and external hard drives. As technologies become more complex and diversified, transparency is reduced, and the risk of human error and data breaches is increased. Data breaches are occurring in every industry sector: financial, retail, healthcare, services, education, technology, manufacturing, transportation, consumer, hotels, leisure, entertainment, marketing, pharmaceutical, communications, research, energy and defense. In 2011, the average organizational cost of a data breach in the U.S. was estimated at $5,501,888.00. The average per capita cost of a data breach was $194....

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