Today Verizon released their Supplement to the 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report. As with previous reports, it is extremely well written, densely loaded with data, and an absolute must read. The bulk of the report gives significantly more information on the breakdown of attacks, by both how often attacks occurred, and how many records were lost as a result of each attack.

While the above is fascinating, where things got most interesting was in the appendix, which was all about comparing the Verizon data set from 2004 through 2008 to the DataLossDB archives from 2000-2009. One of the big outstanding questions from past Verizon reports was how biased is the Verizon dataset, and thus how well does it reflect the world at large? While there was some overlap with the DataLossDB, their dataset is significantly larger (2,300+ events). Verizon discovered a fairly high level of correlation between the two data sets. (Page 25, Table 4). This is huge, because it allows us to start extrapolating about the world at large and what attacks might look like to other organizations.

The great thing about having so much data is that we can now start to prioritize how we implement controls and processes. Case in point: Table 5 on page 26. We once again see that the vast vast majority (over 70%!) of incidents are from outsiders. This tells us that’s where protection should be focused first. If you go back to the body of the supplement and start looking at the details, you can start to re-evaluate your current program and re-prioritize appropriately.