An insurance company data breach that exposed 1.1 million people to identity fraud exemplifies the kind of cybercrime that companies increasingly fear will land them in civil court.
The Nationwide Mutual Insurance went public on Wednesday with notification of an October 3 break-in of a computer network also used by Allied Insurance. Data stolen from the insurers included names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and birth dates.
Such cybercrimes have become the No. 1 worry of publicly traded U.S. companies, in terms of potential litigation and financial losses, according to a recent survey of the Chubb Group. Fully, 63 percent of the respondents said they were most concerned with losing customer or employee data through an electronic security breach.
Their worries are justified. In 2011, the typical data breach resulted in $5.5 million in organizational costs, said the Ponemon Institute. In another study, Ponemon found that of the 583 IT and IT security professionals it surveyed in the U.S., 90 percent said their employers had suffered at least one data breach.
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