498 incidents in the 2009 Data Breach Report

Year of the Hack: Review of 2009 Data Breaches

There were 62 data breaches involving financial institutions in 2009 - three of them occurring in the last month of the year.

These breaches represent only a portion of the total of 498 incidents compiled in the 2009 Data Breach Report compiled by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), based in San Diego, CA. But the largest of them, the Heartland Payment Systems breach, involved an estimated 130 million credit and debit card numbers taken, accounting for more than half of the 222 million records potentially taken in 2009.

The breakdown of the types of the breaches shows these numbers:

Insider Threat - 16;
Missing Paper Documents -15;
Skimming - 8;
Stolen or Missing Hardware - 8;
Outside Network Intrusions - 5;
Unknown Cause - 4;
Exposure of Data on Web - 4;
Accidental breach - 2.

For details on each of the 2009 data breaches, please refer here.