The sheer number of records that were exposed by the comptroller's office makes this the largest breach involving Social Security numbers and other personal data, this year. Despite the size of the breach, the public firing of technology executives over such incidents are relatively rare.

In 2008, , after the theft of backup computer tapes and disk containing personal information on 365,000 individuals.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

in Computerworld's Data Security Topic Center.