Big jump in mega breaches on the Web

WHILE the Heartbleed bug is very much in the news due to its sheer scale, it is by no means the only threat or the most dangerous one out on the Internet. A new report says that last year saw an explosion in the number of data breaches, and "mega breaches" - breaches exposing more than 10 million identities - increased from one in 2012 to eight in 2013.

The latest edition of Internet Security Threat Report shows that, in total, more than 552 million identities were breached in 2013, putting consumers' financial information, birth dates, government ID numbers, home addresses, medical records, passwords and other personal information into the hands of cybercriminals.

Speaking to BizIT, Tan Yuh Woei, Symantec Singapore's country director, put things in perspective. "One of the key breaches was a credit card security breach in South Korea in December 2013, where 105 million accounts were exposed and sold to marketing firms. Besides the financial impact of data breaches, the damage to a company's reputation and the loss of consumer trust m…