Privacy Breach

A privacy breach (also known as data breach) is the intentional or unintentional release of secure information to an untrusted environment. Other terms for this phenomenon include unintentional information disclosure, data leak and also data spill. Incidents range from concerted attack by black hats with the backing of organized crime or national governments to careless disposal of used computer equipment or data storage media.

Definition
A data breach is a security incident in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so. Data breaches may involve financial information such as credit card or bank details, personal health information (PHI), Personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets of corporations or intellectual property.

Trusted Environment
The notion of a trusted environment is somewhat fluid. The departure of a trusted staff member with access to sensitive information can become a data breach if the staff member retains access to the data subsequent to termination of the trust relationship. In distributed systems, this can also occur with a breakdown in a web of trust.

Data Privacy
"Main article: Data Privacy and Tracking"Most such incidents publicized in the media involve private information on individuals, i.e. social security numbers, etc.. Loss of corporate information such as trade secrets, sensitive corporate information, details of contracts, etc. or of government information is frequently unreported, as there is no compelling reason to do so in the absence of potential damage to private citizens, and the publicity around such an event may be more damaging than the loss of the data itself.

Insider versus external threats
Those working inside an organization are a major cause of data breaches. Estimates of breaches caused by accidental "human factor" errors range from 37% by Ponemon Institute to 14% by the Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report. The external threat category includes hackers and state-sponsored actors. Professional associations for IT asset managers work aggressively with IT professionals to educate them on best risk-reduction practices for both internal and external threats to IT assets, software and information.