Examining Data Breaches

Document talking about Privacy Rights Clearing house

Examining Data Breaches

Jason Murph

Baker College

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) is a nonprofit organization whose goals is to raise the consumers awareness of how technology affects personal privacy and empower consumers to take action to control their own personal information. The website has a search engine that allows users to stay up to date with security breaches. There are a wide variety of different breach types and organizations to choose. My report will be a summary of what I gathered from just one of latest breaches and follow with the impact to home and business users.

Recently the Matson Navigation Company (Horizon Lines) notified mariners who served on vessels operated by Horizon Lines that a device containing their personal information has been identified as missing. The article reads

“ The device contained individualized information of mariners who have served aboard vessels operated by Horizon Lines since the year 2000. The information compromised included names, birth dates, addresses, telephone numbers, emergency contact information, social security numbers, and in some cases bank account and routing numbers, photocopies of passports, Transportation Worker Identification Credentials (TWIC), Merchant Mariner Documents (MMD) and Merchant Mariner Credentials (MMC), and copies of specific medical documents”. After the posting there is a reference to let anyone know that if this affects him or her to contact a certain phone number and they are eligible for something called a Allclear ID for up to 12 months at no cost.

The impact this breach has to home users is the lost of valuable information that will not be easy to recover from. The span of information goes back for 15 years so any person that has came in contact with the company within those years could fall victim. The amount and variation of information...