Human Error Biggest Cause of Data Breach: Survey

Mary Jo White, the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said in a speech Friday that cyber-attacks against the U.S. are the “biggest risk we face.”

On the same day, USA Today reported that John Carlin, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said at a hedge-fund conference that several firms had been victimized by “cyber-extortionists.”

Still, one law firm’s survey discovered that the biggest cause of data-security problems is human error.

That’s the finding in a report by the privacy and data protection team at Baker & Hostetler LLP. Of 139 incidents in 2014 in which the ...