Many of the top stories last year related to data breach – from the Target breach during the Christmas Shopping Season (Dec. 2013: Prior Post, Small Business Magazine article; additional news coverage) to the UPS Store data breach during the summer (Aug. 21, 2014) to, more recently, the intentional hacking of Sony Pictures‘ servers (Nov. 24, 2014) and Staples’ data breach (Dec. 19, 2014).

It would be easy to believe that data security breaches happen only to large organizations, but such a belief would be mistaken. In the last year, a number of smaller companies have experienced breaches of the records they maintain. These can occur in at least two ways – 1) they may be the third-party vendor through whom hackers invade a larger company like Target or Home Depot; or 2) they use a third-party vendor who experiences a breach that impacts the smaller company’s customers. Continue reading …