Breach Data Shows Outside Threats Dominated 2011

RSA CONFERENCE 2012 -- San Francisco, Calif. -- More than 85 percent of the data breach incident response cases investigated by Verizon Business last year originated from a hack, and more than 90 percent of them came from the outside rather than via a malicious insider or business partner.

Verizon today published a snapshot of data from its upcoming 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, using data from its own caseload of some 90 of its 855 breach cases for last year.

"This is the first year that we worked more cases outside the U.S. than inside. That ratio has been building and it makes the case that this is not a U.S.-specific problem. All regions are having data breaches," says Wade Baker, director of research and intelligence at Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

At the top of the list of compromised industries again was retail, financial services, and hospitality. And a big factor in this year's cases was the rise in hacktivist-based attacks, according to Baker.

Outside or external attackers jumped from 88 percent in 2010 to 92 percent in 2011, and breaches due to internal threats continued to decline, from just more than 10 percent in 2010 to less than 5 percent in 2011, according to Verizon's data. "We can expect this trend to continue. Every single caseload we ever looked at shows the external [threat agent] as the majority except for one," Baker says.

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