A study carried out by KPMG shows that data on more than 280 million people worldwide has been lost in the past three years due to data breaches and lax security.
46 percent of the cases registered didn't have a password protection or an encryption scheme in place while more than 60 percent involved lost data.
Unsurprisingly education and health care, which are overwhelmingly governed by public bodies, top the list of vulnerable sectors with Financial services came next.
More than 1000 incidents have been reported up to June 2008 (and therefore does not include the hundred of thousands of data files that have been lost by the MoD and the government).
Malcolm Marshall, a partner at KPMG, commented on the report saying that , "Incidents of data loss pose a serious threat to organisations of all sizes and across every business sector. The impact on brand reputation is high and customer trust can be seriously damaged."
You can read the full report here. Note that this is a PDF file.
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