If you’re thinking “What is the population of the United States near the turn of the millennium?” your collection of trivial knowledge is truly impressive and I wouldn’t want to oppose you in Final Jeopardy. In this case, however, you’d have the wrong answer…er, question. The question we’re looking for here is “How many records were compromised among breaches investigated by Verizon Business in 2008?”.

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m as flabbergasted as you are. We knew the number was big when we recently started combing through last year’s statistics in preparation for the upcoming 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), but I don’t think we quite knew it was THAT big. To put this number in perspective, that means 9 records were compromised for every second that ticked by in 2008 – and that’s just among the cases Verizon Business investigated! To put that in further perspective, you may remember that in the 2008 DBIR we reported a figure of 230 million records from cases we worked between 2004 and 2007.

What happened? We’re currently up to our data-loving eyeballs trying to put together an answer to that question. We will have it to you on April 15 in the form of the 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report…so stay tuned.

Tags: Data Breach Report, Information Security, statistics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm and is filed under 2009 Data Breach Report, Studies & Whitepapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.