According to an Australian study conducted by The Ponemon Institute in 2010, data breaches cost Australians $US114 per Australian per year.

With the number of tablets expected to increase and organisations such as the Australian department of defence intergrating tablets into their systems, experts expect cyber criminal activity, including virus attacks and identity theft, to rise in Australia.

Here's some interesting stats for you.. By the end of 2011, there will be almost 50 different tablet devices in the market and over the next 12 to 18 months, there are going to be about 100 million of these devices in the Asia-Pacific market.

This poses challenges for the consumers of IT - especially C-level executives who use the technology to access company information.

Accoring to Trevor Iverach, CA Technologies principal consultant, hackers are trying to infiltrate organisations and grab data and information. Theres not industry that faces the issue more than another.

"If it contains non-public information, financial information, personal identifiable information or personal property, the value for someone who wants to steal the device increases", he said.

So with all this risk, what do you as a consumer do? According to Trevor Iverach, there are two ways to approach this risk - secure the device and secure the data.

Research in Motion (RIM) suggested steps that consumers can take to secure their data. It includes:

1. Protecting sensitive work content by turning on and enabling encryption
2. Keeping work and private information separate
3. Checking privacy settings in social media channels
4. Treating the tablet like a wallet or purse
5. Applying a strong PIN or password and regularly changing it
6. ‘Cleansing’ the tablet before passing it on
7. Only connecting to trustable networks
8. Protecting sensitive data over public networks by using SSL
9. Only installing trustable apps
10. Browsing trustable websites
11. Regularly downloading available software updates

Iverach has also mentioned that organisations should secure devices by determining each tablet's unique identifiable DNA code, adopting two-factor-authentication, using software-based password authentication or utilise data loss prevention (DLP) to ensure access is provided to only those devices.

“Organisations are focused on a layered security approach which hackers infiltrate quite easily because they are using threats such as social security and malware. It needs to evolve to a data centric approach,” he said.