Out-Law.com has a recap of some of the main findings in the 2012 Verizon DBIR:
Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (92-page / 3.47MB PDF) (DBIR) covering the year 2011 found that 174 million records were compromised in a total of 855 data breaches in what it called an “an all time low” for protection against data breaches.
The report outlined that 96% of firms that were required to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and that fell victim to data breaches recorded in Verizon’s own “caseload” from last year, were not compliant with the standards.
Read more on Out-Law.com. Not surprisingly, their figures differ from DataLossDB.org’s figures as DLDB uses somewhat different sources for our breach entries. Thus, where Verizon’s sample is based on 855 incidents, DLDB reported 1,041 incidents for 2011, and where Verizon shows 81% of incidents used some form of hacking, only 30% of DLDB’s entries involved hacking (or 32% if you include virus/malware). As always, interpret with caution/qualifiers.