In the past year or so, there seems to have been a large number of
data breaches, but in reality, the number of victims and major incidents might be on the decline.
In spring 2011, the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec launched massive efforts to cause data breaches and expose the personal information of millions, but those efforts have subsided so far this year, according to new data from the security firm
Symantec. Overall, the number of data breaches per month has dropped to about 14 from roughly 16.5, while the average number of victims per breach dipped to 640,169 from more than 1.3 million.
The reason for the latter decline is that there are far fewer beaches that exposed 10 million or more people, the report said. In the final eight months of 2011, there were five such incidents, compared to just one between January and August of this year.
Ondrej Krehel, chief information security officer for
Identity Theft 911, writes regularly about the threats hackers pose to consumers and organizations.
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