How Safe is Your Personal Data? ... 43% of Companies Experienced a Data Breach in the Past Year

A staggering 43% of companies have experienced a data breach in the past year, an annual study on data breach preparedness finds.

The report, released Wednesday, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute, which does independent research on privacy, data protection and information security policy.

That's up up 10% from the year before.

The absolute size of the breaches is increasing, said Michael Bruemmer, vice president of the credit information company Experian's data breach resolution group, which sponsored the report.

"Particularly beginning with last quarter in 2013, and now with all the retail breaches this year, the size had gone exponentially up," Bruemmer said.

MAJOR DATA BREACHES: Companies that suffered 

serious data breaches when hackers stole customers' 

payment card data and estimated number of cards 

affected, in millions: (CLICK CHART to ENLARGE)

He cited one large international breach few Americans have even heard about. In January, more than 70% of South Koreans ages 15 to 65 — a total of 27 million — had their personal data stolen and credit cards compromised.

The breach was caused by a worker at the Korea Credit Bureau, which provides credit scores to Korean credit card companies.

CLICK CHART to ENLARGE

While shadowy hackers in Eastern Europe often get the blame for these attacks, more than 80% of the breaches that Bruemmer's group works with "had a root cause in employee negligence," he said.

"It could be from someone giving out their password, someone being spear-phished, it could be a lost USB, it could be somebody mishandling files, it could be leaving the door to the network operations center open so someone can walk in," he said.

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