An interesting site I came across that lists USA specific data breaches since 2005. It is updated at least twice per week so the information is really current. I am sure once our Protection of Personal Information Bill becomes law that we will have something similar for South Africa – no more stashing skeletons in the closet!
TOTAL number of records containing sensitive personal information involved in security breaches in the U.S. since January 2005 - 262,638,031 (Excluding the recent Heartland breach I covered in an earlier posting)
What does the Chronology of Data Breaches contain?
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm
The data breaches noted below have been reported because the personal information compromised includes data elements useful to identity thieves, such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, and driver’s license numbers. Some breaches that do NOT expose such sensitive information have been included in order to underscore the variety and frequency of data breaches. However, we have not included the number of records involved in such breaches in the total because we want this compilation to reflect breaches that expose individuals to identity theft as well as breaches that qualify for disclosure under state laws. The breaches posted below include only those reported in the United States. They do not include incidents in other countries.
Don’t forget the Data Loss DB, which it sounds like that site gets its stats from http://www.datalossdb.org/