There was a good article on ChoicePoint in this Sunday's NYT: link.
The best part is a timeline that depicts large data loss reports beginning with ChoicePoint. It includes the number of people notified and the cause of the loss (lost or stolen equipment, hacking, or "other"). Link
Here's what I took away: companies are losing a lot of data for a lot of reasons. The ChoicePoint episode was not at all unusual: sloppy controls on granting access to data. Lots of other incidents are equally mundane: backup tapes fall off the truck, the FedEx envelope never arrives. The good news is that these are the kinds of operational problems that have relatively straightforward solutions. The bad news is that the biggest single cause of data loss appears to be the hackers.
