Afterbytes with Marcus Ranum - Data Leakage

BERLIN/ZURICH (Reuters) - A Swiss lawmaker likened German attempts to buy data on cross-border tax evaders to bank robbery on Tuesday and the Swiss banking lobby said Berlin was acting as a receiver of stolen goods.

Reference: Swiss lawmaker accuses Berlin of "bank robbery"

This could be the start of an interesting trend: targeting information for theft and disclosure. We've already seen that the underground is willing to monetize data leakage, but if governments get involved we'll see organizations getting penalized on both sides: you're fined for leaking the data, and the data is used against you when it does get leaked.

In the next 5 years or so, we can expect to see the data leakage problem come to a head; I think that our law-makers, regulators, and 'the powers that be' still haven't realized the extent of how exposed and distributed our sensitive data has become. We're in the early stage of the game and I believe that the problem has gotten worse - faster - than almost anyone is willing to admit. What is going to happen? It's too late to put the worms back into the can, but putting them back in the can is the only option that actually would work. The next decade is going to see a fascinating collision between reality and fervently held wishes.