Dark Reading looks at the record for database breaches in 2010 to date, and it's not pretty. Institutions have already been hit by six major breaches, and the second half of the year is just starting.

What's interesting to me at Palisade is that half of these breaches involve holes that our PacketSure™ technology helps protect.

One of the breaches involved unencrypted confidential data stored on a laptop. "An Arkansas soldier caused the Arkansas Army National Guard a lot of embarrassment earlier this year when he brought home an external hard drive containing a copy of the Guard's entire personnel database with the personal information of more than 32,000 current and former Guardsmen.," Dark Reading reports. PacketSure™ monitors endpoints to be sure secure data is encrypted.

Two breaches involved confidential data being sent unprotected over the Internet: "A staff doctor who set up a Web application that tapped into a University of Louisville database of dialysis patients put hundreds of patient records at risk by failing to use password protection to prevent unauthorized access to the application." Also, "a business logic flaw in a Web application that was tied to a database of individual insurance customers of health giant WellPoint allowed unauthorized users to potentially access any of 470,000 customer records. The vulnerability was discovered by a WellPoint customer who found that a simple URL manipulation could give her access to other customers' personal data."

PacketSure™ monitors Web traffic leaving your organization's network to watch for patient health data and other confidential information.

We're not going to claim that PacketSure™ is all the protection you need. (What's the old expression? No system is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.) But PacketSure™ from Palisade can be an important part of your organization's data protection regime. To find out more about why DLP is important and how Palisade Systems can help, join us for a free Webinar this afternoon and every Thursday at 3 pm CDT. Or get a live demo, or free Secure Assessment.