The folks at Background Check have put together a chart describing some of the largest IT security breaches ever. Verizon has been tracking online security since 2004, and posted 174 million hacks in 2011, the second highest ever. The chart sheds light upon instances of social hacking, privileged information misuse, hacking, malware and physical attacks.

Presented by: Background Check Guide

Notable mentions are the Epsilon hack, to where millions of user names and emails held by by marketing firm were accessed by hackers in 2011, causing a loss of $4 billion, as well as the massive compromise of the Playstation Network’s user data by hacker group Lulzsec.

In related news, it has been recently reported by Mike Tuttle that companies who are conducting background checks are not governed by any sort of regulations, meaning that anyone with a computer and Google can charge a client for running whatever sort of background history query they’d like. Background check agencies likewise run into a lot of errors, with the top 5 being:

Mismatch people (i.e. a person with no criminal background with someone who has a record, which is especially problematic for people with common names)
Omit crucial information about a case, (i.e. a person is arrested but then found innocent)
Reveal sealed or expunged information (i.e. a juvenile offense)
Provide misleading information, (i.e. a single charge listed multiple times)
Misclassify offenses (i.e. reporting a misdemeanor as a felony)

It is evident that when searching for a job in the United States, it might be best to not have a common first and surname, or a Facebook account for that matter, which an employer might ask for access to.