US, Canada ranked among top countries for data theft, more careless employees lead to data exposure and watch for this possible sign of cyber espionage

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You might expect the United States is the country affected most by data theft in the past seven years. A British consumer website called USwitch came up with that nugget by calculating the amount of publicly-announced data stolen per 100,000 of a country’s population. In second place, South Korea. And number three: Canada. The United Kingdom was in fourth place, followed by Australia. That ranking gives weight to big data thefts rather than the number of breaches. Canada has a lot fewer data breaches than the U.S., but many of them were big — for example last year’s hack of medical laboratory LifeLabs led to the exposure of personal data belonging to 15 million people in Ontario and B.C. The hack in 2015 of the Toronto-based adult dating website Ashley Madison exposed personal data of over 30 million people in several countries.

Employees are still being careless with corporate data. Here’s two of the latest examples: Reporters at the TechCrunch news site recently found unprotected data on a server holding thousands of patient records and lab reports for American psychiatrists and therapists. The data belonged to a customer of NTreatment, a San Francisco-based provider of a cloud-based medical practice management software suite. Not only was the database not password-protected, the data wasn’t encrypted. After being alerted NTreatment said the server was being used for general purpose storage by the user.

Meanwhile The Register reports that a Cayman Island investments fund left its entire data backups open to anyone after failing to properly configure data left on Microsoft Azure, a cloud-based storage service. The fund’s…