In our minds, there are two very interesting items with regard to demographics in this years report.  The first is that the number of attacks in the financial services industry more than doubled in 2008.  More importantly, an amazing 93% of compromised records were the result of breaches in the financial services industry.  As we said in our report, this is largely due to a few cleverly designed and executed attacks which yielded huge payloads.  It will be interesting to see if this trend continues or if the bigger players in the financial services field will be more successful in avoiding these attacks in the coming year.
On a side note, we have seen a few comments from our readers in which they question why we included size of industry in our demographics section.  This was done simply to illustrate that the caseload didn’t all come from very large or very small companies, but was spread across a wide range.
The other noteworthy item is that 13% of the organizations in our caseload had recently changed hands as a result of an acquisition or merger.  While we make no bones about the fact that we cannot draw any ‘scientific’ conclusions from this data point, we find it relevant and of great interest.  Anyone with any experience of large scale change in any company can testify to the fact that they rarely (nice way of saying NEVER) go smoothly. Hopefully, any insight our investigators can lend to what commonalities exist between the breach victims of recently merged companies can be applied to prevent future crimes from occurring.  What are your thoughts?

Tags: Computer Crime, Cybercrime, Data Breach Report, Data Breaches, Data Compromise, forensics, Information Security

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 2:30 am and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.