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: