Verizon security report itemizes annual data breaches

Verizon has published its latest Data Breach Investigations Report, which is released annually and looks at the instances of data breaches that happened over the course of a year. According to the report, 2012 saw 621 data breaches – those that were confirmed, that is – in addition to a much higher approximately 47,000 so-called security incidents. The numbers give us a look at what kind of threats are present, and who is most affected.

A data breach is self-explanatory, meaning that information of some sort has been compromised, whether it is employee data or a roster of login information. A security incident, however, is something related that doesn't quite achieve the "breach" threshold, such as a DDOS attack. According to the breakdown, no one was spared from the cyberattcks, with all sorts of businesses and organizations falling victim.

Small, medium, and large businesses, law enforcement agencies, media companies, financial institutions, commercial websites, organizations, and more all suffered from various security breaches and incidents last year. Out of them, it is said that 76-percent were the result of either stolen or weak usernames/passwords, with the the data being harvested using means ranging from skimmers to malware.

According to the New York Times, Wade Baker, a principal author of the Verizon report, said: "The results validate that any business that operates online is at potential risk of suffering a data breach ... the report shows that no matter the size of the organization — large, small, government agencies, banks, restaurants, retailers — people are stealing data from a range of different organizations and it's a problem everyone has to deal with."

[via New York Times]