2008 Data Breach Investigations Supplemental Report

Verizon Business published the 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) in June of this year. Compiling four years of data from over 500 cases worked by the Verizon Business Investigative Response team, it was intended to be a kind of "state-of-the-union" look at recent security breach and data compromise trends.

As with the original 2008 DBIR, this supplemental report considers three main sources, or origins, of data breaches. They are as follows:

• External—Intuitively, external threats originate from sources outside the organization. Examples include hackers, organized crime groups, and government entities but also environmental events such as typhoons and earthquakes. Typically, no trust or privilege is implied for external entities.
• Internal—Internal threat sources are those originating from within the organization. This encompasses human assets—company executives, employees, and interns—as well as other assets such as physical facilities and information systems. Most insiders are trusted to a certain degree and some, IT administrators in particular, have high levels of access and privilege.
• Partner—Partners include any third party sharing a business relationship with the organization. This value chain of partners, vendors, suppliers, contractors, and customers is known as the extended enterprise. Information is the lifeblood of the extended enterprise and it flows far beyond the boundaries of any single organization. For this reason, some level of trust and privilege is usually implied between business partners.