As more and more businesses require customers to submit sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) to provide goods or services - such as Social Security numbers, and birth dates - people are forced to trust that these companies will safely store their data. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
There were 2,216 confirmed data breaches worldwide in 2017 alone. Data breaches affect companies of all sizes, with 58 percent of targets categorized as small businesses across a range of industries, including health care, education, and financial services.
While data breaches that dominate the news tend to involve the massive corporations and tens of millions of victims, a smaller data breach of a local business that affects people in a limited geographic area is more likely to come across the desk of most attorneys. Three types of data breaches frequently occur in local communities: phishing emails to office staff, employees improperly accessing medical records, or hackers deploying ransomware. Although these data breaches may be "small" in scale, the impact on victims and local communities can be devastating.
Big data breaches grab headlines, but smaller-scale, localized ones occur frequently and have the same impact on consumers. Learn about the features of these breaches and how to handle them in the below article published by the American Association for Justice and written by Faraci Lange partner Hadley Matarazzo and Cohen & Malad attorney Lynn A. Toops.