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The New York State Electric & Gas Co

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As more companies have made use of technology and have been offering digital services, they have been facing the issue of data breaches which has negatively impacted their businesses. During recent years, data breaches have been high in number. Only in 2011 there were 535 breaches reported in the US, which involved 30.4 million sensitive records (Caldwell, 2012). In 2012, The New York State Electric & Gas Co. in Rochester, New York experienced a data breach involving 1.8 million files containing people’s personal information, such as social security numbers, and bank accounts. Utah Department of Technology Services also experienced an attack by hackers which exposed 780,000 patient files (Arma International, 2012). Important information …show more content…

About 73 percent of breaches happen from outside the organization (Patel-Predd, 2008). Companies today invest large amounts of money in data security in order to protect their information. However, data breaches still continue to happen and the number of them is steadily increasing in small and big companies, which often are found in situations where they have to decide about what changes they should make in order to avoid future data breaches.

2 Problem
2.1 Problem statement

There is no generally available source of information that lists a range of options for companies to take necessary steps for avoiding data breaches from reoccurring.

2.2 Significance of the problem and potential benefits

Some companies continue to experience data breaches more than one time, even if they have already put security measures in place. After already making investments in data security, it becomes difficult for companies to decide what the next steps will be for preventing future data breaches. There are different strategies published regarding this issue. However, there is no document that provides a range of options that companies can choose based on their situation after a data breach.

As data breaches occur in companies that have already invested large amounts of money in data security, it is often a challenge to make decisions about future investments that would improve their data security and avoid data breaches.

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