BreachBytes

Robert Vamosi has a nice overview of two recent reports on his Defense in Depth blog, the first on data breaches and the second on identity theft. The interesting figures from both reports: 9/10 breaches could have been prevented by following best practices and 57% of identity thieves use the information to open new lines of credit (not too surprising).

A summary of the Verizon report on data breaches is available here while the entire report can be found here as a PDF. Likewise, a summary of the identity theft report can be found here and the full version here as a PDF.

There have been several blog posts and articles that have come out lately that have to do with compiling the statistics behind the cost of a breach and the probability of data loss. There is no shortage of these types of statistics but they seem to be getting more granular and informative.

On the Data Auditing Blog there is a good two part series authored by Prat Moghe the founder of Tizor. In the first part of the series he compiles a report from a ITRC (Identity Theft Resource Center) press release on the number of losses. What’s impressive about Moghe’s work is that he not only cites the ITRC numbers be he goes on to compare them against some of his own research and analysis based on information in the Attrition database. Here are to interesting snippets from the post:

1. “They [ITRC] concluded that 2007 had 443 breaches with 127MM losses, vs. 315 breaches and 20MM losses in 2006. This means 40% growth in breaches between 2006 and 2007. “
2. “It turns out that the average loss per moderate loss incident is roughly constant! Yes - across all three years - it is roughly 50,000 losses per incident. (Precisely, this loss was 55K (2005) vs. 50K (2006) vs. 45K (2007)).”

While it seems counter-intuitive, Moghe points out that there may even be a “loss constant” (ie what an enterprise can expect in terms of the number of losses per incident based on the average over the past three years).

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SC Magazine reported today that the Davidson Companies, a Montana-based financial firm disclosed “one of its databases, containing the names and Social Security numbers of 226,000 current and past clients, was illegally accessed ‘by a third party through a sophisticated network intrusion.’” In response the firm “took its public website offline after learning of the intrusion, hired a security consulting firm to investigate the theft and notified the major credit-reporting bureaus after learning about the incident.”

We keep beating the drum at BreachBytes that enterprises need to have a response and recovery plan in place because Breaches are inevitable.