According to a KPMG (UK) survey reported in ComputerWeekly early last week, more than 280 million people worldwide have lost personal details because of data breaches in the last three years. KPMG claims that about half (46 per cent) of cases had no password protection or encryption, while nearly two thirds (62 per cent) were cases of data being lost rather than stolen.

The public sector, KPMG said, was responsible for 19 per cent of data losses with education and health care while fourteen per cent of losses were in financial services.

In a related story in the Japan Times, computer viruses spread by USB flash drives are occurring at an ever increasing rate. The story also says that just over half of new computer viruses are being programmed specifically to be spread by USB drives.

Then, according to a story in the London Telegraph, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari decreed that cyber terrorism is a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment. The Telegraph says that cyber terrorism is described as the accessing of a computer network or electronic system by someone who then â¿¿knowingly engages in or attempts to engage in a terroristic act."

Finally, in another ComputerWeekly story, a spam study carried out by computer scientists from University of California Berkeley and University of California San Diego, spammers make a profit if only one sale is made per 12.5 million emails. The story notes that direct mail campaigns aim for a 2.15% response rate: spammers need only a response rate of less than 0.00001%.