2011 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report

Verizon recently released their Data Breach Investigations Report.  The report covers approximately 800 data breach cases from 2010.  The review of breaches covers threat agents and actions, how breaches typically occur, and provides statistics on breached organizations.

Below you will find a summary of organizations who have reported breaches in the past year by size. It may be surprising to find that organizations with 11 to 100 employees have reported 436 breaches.

1 to 10	46
11 to 100	436
101 to 1,000	74
1,001 to 10,000	49
10,001 to 100,000	59
Over 100,000	55
Unknown	40

This may not be surprising to you, but the report concludes that 97 percent of the breaches could have been avoided by using simple controls. Do you have the simple controls in place to protect your organization's data? According to the study, organizations should focus mitigation efforts in the following areas:

Marketing Firm's Customer Data Exposed by Hackers

One of the country's largest e-mail marketing firms, Epsilon, reported that on March 30th, “a subset of Epsilon clients’ customer data [was] exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon’s email system."

Epsilon is a subsidiary of Alliance Data Systems and sends over 40 billion emails annually for their clients. These clients include 7 of the top Fortune 10 companies.

Companies whose clients may have been affected by this breach include:

Brookstone

Capital One Financial Corp.

Citigroup 

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Kroger Co.

Marriott International Inc. 

McKinsey & Co.

New York & Co.

Ritz-Carlton

TiVo Inc.

US Bancorp

Walgreen Co.

The hackers were only able to access names and email addresses, and it is still unknown if the information has been used in any email based attacks aimed at obtaining credit card or social security numbers.

This attack reminds us to be vigilant and skeptical of all unsolicited emails or emails from unknown senders. Keep in mind the following tips next time you check your email:

1. Under no circumstances should anyone respond to an email from an unknown or known party that asks for sensitive personal data. 
2. If you receive an email from an unknown sender, delete it and mark it as spam in your email client. If you receive an email asking for personal or financial information from an organization that you are a customer of, notify their customer service office immediately.
3. Also, do not click on links in email or pop-up messages that may come up after clicking a link in an email that asks for your personal or financial information. 
4. Always use anti-spyware software and a firewall to protect your computer.
5. Never open or download attachments from an email from an unknown sender.