Financial Services Companies Have The Data Hackers Want

In the newly published study on financail data security breaches between 2000 and 2008, it reports that 12 percent of data breach incidents come from financial services companies, but account for over one third of all records compromised.

Financial services companies are often targeted by criminals because that is where the “crown jewels” are. Breaches that result in large scale financial gain are usually associated with financial institutions and the sensitive data they maintain.

You can contrast this with the education vertical which accounts for 30 percent of breaches but only 3 percent of records compromised.

It is also intersting that if you compare how frequently businesses report the number of records compromised, financial services companies report these number about 66 percent of the time while other organizations are closer to 90 percent. It is unknown if this is because they simply don’t know how many records are compromised, or due to lack of specific requirements, they simply don’t disclose it.