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Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

This is the weblog for Pete Finnigan. Pete works in the area of Oracle security and he specialises in auditing Oracle databases for security issues. This weblog is aimed squarely at those interested in the security of their Oracle databases.

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Only 6% of identity theft can be attributed to data theft.



I saw Beth's post today on her blog titled "Identity Theft: Only 6% From Data Breaches?" and was interested to read. She refers to an article "Data breaches yield few ID thefts, survey says - A bigger danger: Stolen wallets and checkbooks" that discussed identity thefts and this article claims that the biggest culprit is theft of wallets or checkbooks. I have to wonder about these results. Is this based on actual numbers of crimes or numbers of identities stolen. One wallet - likely to be one identity theft. One database breach can be 10s of thousands and in some cases millions of identities stolen. Imagine the number of wallets stolen every day, a lot are most likely stolen for the contents (Money and cards) for use not to clone or steal identities. This would seem to imply that large data breaches result in very small numbers of identities being stolen. This is an interesting study, the article sites two other studies that seem to back up the claims.