Would Increased Regulation Reduce the Number of Information Breaches?

Private Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is increasingly stored and lost by a variety of organizations. The retail, healthcare, technology, banking, and gaming industries as well as many government agencies have been particularly hard hit by high visibility security breaches that compromised millions of individual's records. Decisions to protect information are not always based on good risk management practices and can often be affected by the need to comply with an industry or government regulation. We examine the effectiveness of regulation within several industries to determine whether increased regulation would result in a reduction in information compromises.