Verizon releases its Data Breach Investigations Report

Posted by Caitlin on June 24th, 2008

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Verizon’s 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report, which analyzed 500 data breaches over the past four years, including three of the largest ever reported, offers some surprising and informative statistics.

• 73% of data breaches resulted from external sources
• 18% were caused by outsiders
• 39% implicated business partners
• 30% involved multiple parties
• 66% involved data the victim did not know was on the system
• 75% of breaches were not discovered by the victim
• 87% were considered avoidable through reasonable controls
• 62% were attributed to a significant human error
• 59% resulted from hacking and intrusions
• 31% incorporated malicious code
• 22% exploited a vulnerability
• 15% were due to physical threats

Although Verizon’s study indicated that far fewer data breaches resulted from insider sources, in the cases where the culprit was an insider, the size and consequences of the breach were significantly greater. The time it took to conduct an attack ranged from minutes to hours, but it generally took organizations months or years to discover the breach, and once they did discover the breach they were slow to respond. The average breach involved about 1.2 million records.

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