In Pictures: The most mortifying moments in IT security history

From Lockheed Martin and HBGary Federal to the US government and Cornell University, no one is immune to humiliating security glitches

The Federal Trade Commission in 2006 fined data broker ChoicePoint $15 million after it admitted personal financial records of more than 163,000 consumers in its database had been compromised. This didn’t happen because ChoicePoint’s network was breached, but because ChoicePoint mistakenly sold it to fraudsters. The FTC estimates at least 800 cases of identity theft occurred. “The reality is we were never as evil as people thought we were, but we were never as good as we thought we were,” explained James Lee, ChoicePoint’s chief marketing officer, to the New York Times.

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