Australia's biggest bank, Commonwealth, admitted to losing the financial records of almost 20 million customer accounts after a subcontractor lost two magnetic tape drives containing names, addresses, account numbers and 16 years of transaction information, exposing half the country’s population in an unprecedented data breach.

A glaring corporate blind spot for data theft is IT asset disposition (ITAD). When IT assets are retired, vendors of wildly varying legitimacy, competency and certification are engaged to process them. Improprieties can and do occur with growing regularity. Increasingly, ITAD companies are owned by foreign companies and are responsible for destruction of a significant amount of data belonging to U.S. corporations and government entities.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about a data breaches. The theft and sale of stolen data, including personally identifying information (PII), corporations’ trade secrets, and world governments’ most embarrassing classified information has become both commonplace and lucrative. In fact, data is widely considered more valuable than commodities like oil or gold.