Expedia’s Trip Adviser, email marketing provider Epsilon, Sony’s online entertainment services, professional engineering society Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They all suffered some kind of a data breach in the first four months of 2011. At one point, it seemed like there was at least one new security breach being reported every week. The incidents listed above don’t include any health care data breaches, accidental information exposure like British Petroleum’s lost laptop or Texas State Comptroller’s office storing information on an open FTP server or corporate espionage such as the attacks on RSA Security and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. What organizations get hit depend entirely on what motivates the attacker. In recent months have shown it’s not always about “dollars and cents.”

If you are an organization with money, there is someone out there who would be happy to steal it from you. If you have valuable data, same deal.

From PrivacyRights.org a there is a compiled list containing more than 150 events reported in 2011. Focused on hacked incidents, or “electronic entry by an outside party, malware and spyware.”

The 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report was recently released and shows that while data loss has seen a large decline over the past several years, the number of attacks nearly quadrupled. The path to secure networks has been a journey full of twists and turns with numbers reaching as high as 361 million records compromised historically to only 4 million in 2010.

What are you doing, to eliminate these risks?