Theft of confidential data increases. - According to a new KPMG report, 110 million people were directly or indirectly affected by “cyber attacks” in the world between January and June 2009. A large portion of this figure relates to a breach at Heartland Payment Systems, where more than 100 million credit/debit card users were affected at the beginning of last year. This incident is at present one of the largest data breaches in US history. According to KPMG, more people, affected by the crisis and technological development, are tempted to steal data from the companies where they work. Since its implementation in 2005, the consultants' Data Loss Barometer has detected 2,300 incidents of data theft or loss, affecting a total of approximately 700 million people in the world. Given that most of the incidents are not made public, these figures could be “just the tip of the ice-berg”. According to KPMG there are increasing numbers of attacks carried out from the outside by network piracy and computer systems. Insider data theft jobs have also significantly increased by 50% over the first half of 2009. In 10% of cases, data theft was committed by employees of the companies concerned. These acts were mostly committed to help competitors (70%) or when employees set up their own businesses (23%). The most frequently used method to appropriate strategic information is by email (46%), followed by hard copy (22%) and only 9% by copies on CD, DVD, USB or external disks. Financial services is the most affected sector (101.5 million people affected out of the 110 million between January and June 2009), followed by government services (3.5 million). Although all sectors are attempting to tackle breaches more or less successfully, government services are not managing to reduce this kind of crime - quite the contrary. Since 2008 there has been an 18% increase in this sector and a 30% increase since 2007. (I.L./transl.fl)