Verizon has published its 2012 data breach investigations report. This years report is a result of analysing 855 incidents, 174 million compromised records and it represents a broader and more diverse geographical scope.

Some key points from the executive summary of the report

Who is behind data breaches?

• 98% stemmed from external agents (+6%)
• 4% implicated internal employees (-13%)
• <1% committed by business partners (<>)
• 58% of all data theft tied to activist groups

How do breaches occur?

• 81% utilized some form of hacking (+31%)
• 69% incorporated malware (+20%)
• 10% involved physical attacks (-19%)
• 7% employed social tactics (-4%)
• 5% resulted from privilege misuse (-12%)

What commonalities exist?

• 79% of victims were targets of opportunity (-4%)
• 96% of attacks were not highly difficult (+4%)
• 94% of all data compromised involved servers (+18%)
• 85% of breaches took weeks or more to discover (+6%)
• 92% of incidents were discovered by a third party (+6%)
• 97% of breaches were avoidable through simple or intermediate controls (+1%)
• 96% of victims subject to PCI DSS had not achieved compliance (+7%)

Where should mitigation efforts be focused?

Smaller organizations

• Implement a firewall or ACL on remote access services
• Change default credentials of POS systems and other Internet-facing devices
• If a third party vendor is handling the two items above, make sure they.ve actually done them

Larger organizations

• Eliminate unnecessary data; keep tabs on what.s left
• Ensure essential controls are met; regularly check that they remain so
• Monitor and mine event logs
• Evaluate your threat landscape to prioritize your treatment strategy
• Refer to the conclusion of this report for indicators and mitigators for the most common threats

You can read the full report here