Most organizations take months -- or years -- to discover a breach
Over 90 percent of data breaches are the result of external attacks and almost 60 percent of organizations discovered them months or years later, Verizon said in a report released at the RSA security conference on Wednesday.
Called the Verizon 2011 Investigative Response Caseload Review, it compiles statistics from 90 data breach cases investigated by the company's incident response team last year, and provides a preview of Verizon's larger annual report that will contain data collected from additional sources like national CERTs and law enforcement agencies.
The report concludes that 92 percent of data breach incidents have had an external cause, which conflicts with the findings of other security vendors, according to whom most data breaches are the result of internal threats. "I think that's a bit of a myth in the security community," said Wade Baker, director of risk intelligence for Verizon Business. "There's fewer people inside of an organization than there are outside and I think it stands to reason that, by the numbers, we will have more external incidents."
