One stolen laptop. Unlimited data up for grabs. But what should you really be concerned about?

Well, if you’re a business owner, take a look at your customers. A recent study by the Ponemon Institute indicates that after a data breach, almost one-third of the customers notified terminate their relationship with the company.

In Sue Poremba’s article on the NewsFactor Network, she details how more often than not, a data breach happens inside the company. Since companies are so concerned with outside data breaches, or potential virus infections, it’s a lot easier for IT personnel to overlook what’s going on behind closed doors rather than outside.

If you’ve been reading this blog, chances are you came across the entry about the Intel robbery. A man who worked for Intel allegedly stole files from the company’s database because he still had internal access despite the fact that he left the company. Poremba explains, “Too often, when an employee leaves a company or even transfers from one department to another, the person’s account isn’t closed or changed.” This is, as Poremba continues to describe, “perhaps the biggest breakdown in database auditing.”

Fraud concerning customer and propriety data is the number one reason for financial loss among companies. And on top of that, most breaches happen from the inside.

Now, let’s not all jump to the big S conclusion (…sabotage), but companies should still take note that your customer base can significantly drop — yes, up to one-third — when data breach occurs.

Protection like the security options offered by MyLaptopGPS can recover your data and help maintain your customer base. And certainly it’s better to be safe than sorry for yourself. ]]> http://blog.mylaptopgps.com/2008/11/04/how-laptop-theft-is-eating-at-your-customer-base/feed/ 1 http://blog.mylaptopgps.com/2008/08/12/government-agency-just-now-notifies-380000-that-their-information-was-on-a-laptop-computer-stolen-one-year-ago/ http://blog.mylaptopgps.com/2008/08/12/government-agency-just-now-notifies-380000-that-their-information-was-on-a-laptop-computer-stolen-one-year-ago/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:34:50 +0000 MyLaptopGPS Blog Staff http://blog.mylaptopgps.com/?p=16 We’ve reported on the prevalence of laptop theft in many ways. The crime is rampant, frequently places consumers’ valuable data records in harm’s way, and costs billions. And now we can top off all this with the fact that many organizations seem to take forever to notify those whose data records are on stolen machines that their identities just might be in danger.

Take the recent news from across the pond.

This week, The Irish Times and others are reporting that the country’s Department of Social and Family Affairs lost a laptop computer to theft–a year ago. Furthermore, the agency is apparently just now contacting the social welfare recipients whose personal details were stored on the computer–all 380,000 of them, including about 100,000 whose bank account information was mixed in with the records on the machine.

Is it any wonder that consumers “are dissatisfied with the notification process used by companies following a data breach affecting their personal information,” according to a news release covering recent research from the Ponemon Institute on 1,795 U.S. consumers? The Consumer’s Report Card on Data Breach Notification reveals that more than 55 percent of respondents to the Ponemon survey report receiving notification of a data breach more than one month after the incident. Additionally, 50 percent of respondents rate the timeliness, clarity and quality of these notifications as only fair or poor.

While Ponemon’s research doesn’t specifically explore cases in which victims have waited as long as a year after an event occurs before even learning that the theft indeed happened (and that the incident left their information in peril for all that time), consumers on both sides of the Atlantic probably don’t like the idea. Needless to say, a viable laptop tracking and data recovery solution would have gone a long way in helping Ireland’s social welfare agency to retrieve its own laptop–and, more importantly, other people’s data that just so happened to be on the organization’s mobile computing device.