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PKWARE


A Little Background, Please
In today's electronic society, it is not uncommon to learn of a data breach involving millions of customer records - records that contain personally identifiable information like your Social Security Number, credit and debit card numbers, and other account numbers.

To date, the largest data breach on record involved TJX Companies, the owner of retail brands that include TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods. Announced by TJX in January 2007, 94 million credit and debit card numbers belonging to an unspecified number of customers in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Ireland, and the United Kingdom were stolen from one of its payment systems over a period of nearly two years by an unknown number of hackers.

As a result of the breach, the retail chain brokered settlements of $24 million in restitution to Mastercardissuing lenders and $41 million to Visa to settle costs and losses incurred by the card issuers. Visa executives estimated their actual loss between $65 and $83 million. In addition to this monetary impact on the company, the Federal Trade Commission mandated that TJX submit to independent thirdparty security audits every other year for the next 20 years.

While the TJX compromise easily eclipses the next largest breach (40 million records in 2005 at CardSystems Solutions), news just broke in January 2009 of a potentially larger breach at Heartland Payment Systems. The company announced that cybercriminals compromised its computer network, gaining access to customer information associated with the 100 million card transactions it handles each month.

Protect Your Data
According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, data breaches increased dramatically in 2008. Their recently released breach report details that 656 data-loss incidents occurred in 2008, an increase of 47 percent over 2007's total of 446.

To avoid a breach, as well as comply with various laws, regulations, and mandates, it is obvious that a company needs to protect one of its most important business assets - its data.

Several factors, such as the variety of computing platforms within an organization and the number of employees and business partners requiring access to data, make it difficult to successfully implement an enterprise- wide data security solution.

Solutions from PKWARE
PKWARE, Inc., headquartered in Milwaukee, provides software solutions that allow companies to simplify the protection of their important files, streamline operations, and meet data security compliance requirements. In addition, PKWARE solutions help organizations avoid falling victim to a data breach.

Tens of thousands of organizations in financial services and banking, healthcare, government, retail, and manufacturing industries use PKWARE solutions daily. In fact, more than 20 percent of mainframes across the world use PKWARE products.

As the inventor and continuing innovator of the .ZIP file format - the most widely used standard for storing or exchanging file-based data - PKWARE uses .ZIP technology as the foundation for our PKZIP and SecureZIP software families. If you've ever zipped a file, you've used technology created by PKWARE in 1986.

Our PKZIP software is the "gold standard" technology for compressing files. It is the industry-leading compression utility that zips and unzips files, greatly reducing file transmission times and required storage space. It also improves processing efficiencies and reduces costs for our enterprise and government customers.

Our SecureZIP software not only compresses files, but it protects them using passphrase- or digital certificate-based encryption. Using a data-centric security approach, where the data itself is protected no matter where it travels, SecureZIP ensures that information is protected whether the data is in transit (files being exchanged between endpoints) or at rest (archived files on a variety of media). SecureZIP is currently in use by over 25,000 companies to ensure the security of their important data.

Visit PKWARE at Java and Jobs
Be sure to stop by and see us at the Java and Jobs 2009 event. PKWARE is offering an internship that might be right for you!


Read more articles in ITSO..GOOD Vol. 2 No. 5

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