US Data Breaches Up 47% in 2008
The sad part about these statistics is that nothing much changed in 2008 over past years in terms of the type of victims and types of breaches committed. There were just more of them -- 47% more over 2007-- according to an annual study recently released by the Identity Theft Resource Center and reported by Finextra, a British financial industry newsletter.
The ITRC noted that the financial sector continued to be hit the most -- no surprises there -- but that government fell down to third place. The biggest source of breaches continued to be malware attacks, hacking and insider theft. Human error type breaches, such as loss of data on the move and accidental exposure, were down but still enough to be of concern.
Links to more reports, including the breach list and breach statistics, are on the ITRC site.
The ITRC noted that the financial sector continued to be hit the most -- no surprises there -- but that government fell down to third place. The biggest source of breaches continued to be malware attacks, hacking and insider theft. Human error type breaches, such as loss of data on the move and accidental exposure, were down but still enough to be of concern.
Links to more reports, including the breach list and breach statistics, are on the ITRC site.
posted by The IT Security Guy at 9:51 AM
2 Comments:
To prevent breaches from occurring, there’s been an exciting development called Format-Preserving Encryption (FPE) that makes it easy for organizations to protect information at the data-level as it’s collected, used and stored in databases and applications, and no matter where it goes. Here’s a link for more information, which might be of interest, including how it works: http://www.voltage.com/technology/Technology_FormatPreservingEncryption.htm
Yeah, I noticed the same thing when I was checking out the stats earlier this week. The problem is only getting worse.
Human error and data loss are still significant, but the big problem -- targeted hacker attacks, are still a priority threat.
There's a good post on what motivates hackers here:
http://www.pcis.com/web/vvblog.nsf/dx/why-do-hackers-hack
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