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5 Lessons Learned From Recent Retail Data Breaches [infographic]

Here are some hard lessons learned for retailers concerning data breaches.

July 25, 2014 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

The recent news of a payment data breach at Goodwill Industries had a perverse air of inevitability to it. Over the past few years, it seems that our cultural attitude toward these incidents has shifted from "How could this have happened?" to "Who is it going to happen to next?"

More than one security expert has said to us, words to this effect: There are two kinds of companies, those that know their data has been compromised and those that don't. In April, Heartbleed showed us that 66 percent of the Internet was prone to attack. That meant that everybody who had ever used Facebook or made a purchase on Amazon or watched a movie on Hulu or Netflix was in the potential crosshairs of some very bad people. Which is to say, practically everyone who uses the Internet.

While the number of data breaches is increasing – 30 percent higher in 2013 than the previous year – most of them have been deemed preventable. Retailers and any other organizations that are entrusted with consumer data need to get ahead of this issue now. The bad guys do not sleep.

We've put together this infographic, with help from our sponsor VendorSafe. We welcome your thoughts on the issue, and how you and your business are dealing with it.

+ click to enlarge image