Ultrasaur Blog

Keeping track of exciting new threats to your digital records.

Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

Threat distribution by industry

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Not entirely counter-intuitive, but there’s a new study out showing that different industires suffer data breaches in different proportions (but still suffer them).

The Health Care and Social Assistance sector reported a larger than average proportion of lost and stolen computing hardware, but reported an unusually low proportion of compromised hosts. Educational Services reported a disproportionally large number of compromised hosts, while insider conduct and lost and stolen hardware were well below the proportion common to the set as a whole. Public Administration’s proportion of compromised host reports was below average, but their proportion of processing errors was well above the norm. The Finance and Insurance sector experienced the smallest overall proportion of processing errors, but the highest proportion of insider misconduct. Other sectors showed no statistically significant difference from the average, either due to a true lack of variance, or due to an insignificant number of samples for the statistical tests being used.

Source: Interhack (Full study as a PDF)

Survey: 37% of employees would become insiders given the right incentive | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Would you sell sensitive company data if you’re offered the right incentive? Using the current economic situation, or pure greed as an excuse, 37% of employees surveyed at this year’s Infosecurity Europe event said that they are keeping their options open. via Zero Day, ZDNet.com.

I expect this is an undercount, but it’s a useful estimate of the percentage of people who would change data if they could make money doing it.