Data Breaches, Corporate

A data breach occurs when an organization or a government intentionally or unintentionally shares data, which can consist of any kind of information. While the most prominent breaches have involved the unauthorized sharing of identifiable personal information outside the purpose for which it was gathered, a breach can involve other data, such as financial information and intellectual property. As long as an organization or a government stores data, those data are vulnerable to a breach. Corporate data breaches represent a specific subset of data breaches that occur when the stolen or misappropriated data were in the care of a corporation at the time of the breach.

Although a data breach typically involves a security incident in which a database is accessed by someone outside an organization, ...