Incidents at Marriott International, Ford Motor Company, and ABN Amro Mortgage Group served as eerie reminders to CIOs that they could be the next victims of thieves looking to poach Social Security and credit-card numbers, or of business-process breakdowns that cause sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands.

Most CIOs will tell you that getting hacked is inevitable. But there is getting hacked, and then there is getting sacked.

As the volume of information increases and criminals grow more brazen, the chances of companies suffering a worst-case scenario seem less remote every day. Part of any CIO's duty is to convince the boss that the company is ready for the very worst security crisis imaginable.

Tales of Tech Terror

An example of just how easily a security problem can hit a company is the data breach Ford Motor Company reported in the first week of January. Ford officials reported the theft of a computer with files that have the names and Social Security numbers of approximately 70,000 current and former employees of the company.

Adding insult to significant injury, that theft had nothing to do with network intrusion or social-engineering tricks typically employed by data thieves. Neither did the disappearance in December of a box containing information on some two million customers of ABN Amro Mortgage Group, one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders.

ABM Amro's customers learned that their Social Security numbers and other personal information were lost by a DHL courier on the way to the credit bureau Experian. A month later, a DHL worker found the unlabeled carton of data in the same DHL facility where it had been lost.

Meanwhile, someone at the corporate offices of Marriott Vacation Club International, in Orlando, Florida, either misplaced or removed computer backup tapes containing data about some 206,000 associates, timeshare owners, and customers. The company reported the missing tapes in late December.

Marriott officials mailed notifications to the affected people. In an effort to quell panic about possible identity theft, corporate officials said that the tapes require specialized equipment to read their content. Marriott is investigating how the tapes went astray and will monitor for unusual activity or possible misuse of the data. (continued...)

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