Chief Cause of Data Breaches

By Baselinemag  |  Posted 2008-02-06 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

See the data behind the substantial rise in identity theft and data breaches from 2007—a record year.

CHIEF CAUSE OF DATA BREACHES
While hackers account for the most compromised records, improperly discarded and secured paper lead the number of breach incidents in 2007. The number of compromised records doesn’t always tell the whole story, since many breaches had unknown number of records exposed—some suspected of totaling in the hundreds of thousands.
credit
Type of Breach Incidents Percentage
of Total
Incidents		 Incidents
With
Unknown
Records		 Incidents
With
Unknown
Records		 Percentage
of Incidents
With Unknown
Affected
Rewards
Compromised paper documents 80 18.5% 297,733 50 62.5%
External hacker breach 77 17.8 95,405,165 25 32.4
Stolen/lost laptop(s) 67 15.5 2,029,108 18 26.8
Erroneous Web posts 54 12.5 360,091 5 9.2
Stolen/lost storage media 48 11.1 7,506,500 13 27.0
Stolen/lost computer(s) 47 10.9 1,692,864 10 21.2
Internal data theft (digital) 17 3.9 18,979,955 3 17.6
Network security lapse 14 3.2 137,506 5 35.7
E-mail sata leak 8 1.9 10,813 3 37.5
Miscellaneous 7 1.6 10,659 3 42.8
Unsecure data transfer 6 1.3 1,352,600 1 16.6
Unauthorized data
access/disclosure		 6 1.3 467,500 3 50.0
Total 431      a 120,250,494 139      32.2
Source: Identity Theft Resource Center
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