Financial services firm Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has become the latest firm to suffer a breach of its customer data archives.

According to documents posted by financial news service Credit.com, the company has notified its customers that a pair of CDs containing the names, addresses, social security numbers and account numbers for users had gone missing.

The CDs were said by the company to be headed for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance as part of a financial filing package. The information was password protected, but not encrypted.

Credit.com said that the missing discs contained the information on roughly 34,000 customers.

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney did not respond to a request for confirmation or comment on the reports.

The breach comes at a time when data breach reports are becoming increasingly common. According to a recent survey from Juniper Networks, as many as 90 per cent of enterprises have suffered some sort of data breach in the last 12 months.

Authorities in the UK have recently sought to overhaul data breach regulations in the country to tighten rules on disclosing breaches. Meanwhile, researchers estimate that data breaches cost businesses an average of £2m per incident.

Customers who have been affected by the breach are being advised to keep a close eye on their credit activity. Juniper Networks director of cloud security marketing Johnnie Konstantas suggested that where possible, users should change the compromised information.

"I would try to understand all the data that was compromised and make an inventory about those pieces of data," she told V3.co.uk.

"Data like this is extremely valuable and there is a market for it."

For Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, the focus looks to shift towards protecting customers and understanding the underlying cause of the breach.

Nikfar Khaleeli, director of data loss prevention at McAfee, told V3.co.uk that while Morgan Stanley Smith Barney suffered an apparent breakdown in its security procedures by not encrypting the disks, the company is far from alone in falling victim to these types of breaches.

"Morgan Stanley is not the only company where this has happened, it is a blend of people and processes," he explained.

"It is a pervasive problem and it highlights the need for having pervasive protection."