It is not uncommon to receive an email from a business or not-for-profit organization (NPO) that gives an exhaustive email list of all the intended recipients in the carbon copy (cc:) line of the email. An open email distribution like this is considered a poor privacy practice and poor email etiquette.

The risks of sending an open email distribution include the compromise of valuable intellectual property (the mailing list), privacy violations that could result in regulatory action and an unprofessional appearance that reflects on the credibility of your organization.

You have a small business, and you discover that your computer system has been hacked. It might be a sophisticated cyber-scheme to get your customer credit card account information or low-tech espionage where a competitor manually guesses at individual user names and passwords. They find out who your customers are, what they are ordering and how much they pay; then they contact them with better deals.

Either way, a crime has been committed.  Your cyber property has been burglarized and your information assets have been stolen.

Four years ago today, ChoicePoint shocked the nation by admitting to the largest data breach of the time involving 145,000 consumer records.  That number has been dwarfed by   the TJX Companies compromise of approximately 100 million consumer records and last month by Heartland Payment Systems which some describe as the largest of all breaches, although the number of records compromised remains unknown.

A recent study suggests that women are more likely to be victims of identity theft than men are. The reporting suggests women are less technical savvy than men who favor online transactions over face-to-face transactions. Women, what do you think? Is this really the explanation?