Large business data breaches - like the one affecting 100 million Capital One credit card customers and applicants - remain commonplace, so much so that they are becoming accepted as the new normal in today’s climate of consumer dealings. They shouldn’t be.
On October 3, 2012, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and its wholly-owned subsidiary Allied Property & Casualty Insurance Company experienced a data breach when a hacker exploited a vulnerability on the companies’ web application hosting software. This hack resulted in the compromise of the personal information of 1.27 million consumers, including social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, credit scoring information, and other data used to provide insurance quotes.
Last Thursday, Governor Martinez of New Mexico signed into law the 48th state-level data breach notification law, bringing the requirements for notifying individuals affected by data breaches to this state.
First introduced in 2015 and signed into law in June 2016, an amendment to the Massachusetts Public Records Law (M.G.L. c.66) now makes the state’s Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation (OCABR) online Data Breach Notification Archive available to the public.
