Verizon Business Study: Organized Crime Cause of Spike in Data Breaches

Verizon Business just issued its “2009 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report” study and it uncovered some very sobering facts about data breaches, revealing that corporations fell victim to some of the largest cybercrimes ever during 2008. In fact, more electronic records were breached in 2008 than the previous four years combined. Much of this was fueled by a targeting of the financial services industry and a strong involvement of organized crime.

The second annual study is based on data analyzed from Verizon Business’ actual caseload comprising 285 million compromised records from 90 confirmed breaches. And the news is not good for the financial sector, accounting for 93 percent of all such records compromised last year, and a staggering 90 percent of these records involved groups identified by law enforcement as engaged in organized crime.

Click here to read the full report.