Last week Verizon Business released its 2010 Data Breaches and Investigations Report with some fascinating results. According to the report, 48% of data breaches are caused by insiders, up from only 22% last year.

Not surprisingly, the research also identified the misuse of privileges as the top threat vector for the year. Even less of a surprise is the fact that database servers were the top target in terms of both the number of breaches (25%) and volume of records (92%).

This report (and reports by other organizations such as DataLossDB and the Identity Theft Resource Center) states that public breach disclosures were down significantly in 2009. The authors suggest that the decline could have occurred because either the supply of stolen data has outpaced demand, or law enforcement is becoming more effective in capturing criminals.

In my opinion there could be a third, more ominous reason for the decline in disclosures: the Verizon report states that discovery by external parties – including third party-fraud detection, law enforcement, and so on – dropped significantly in 2009. Perhaps cybercriminals are getting better at covering their tracks.

Starting on page 59 the report offers conclusions and recommendations. It was good to see that restricting and monitoring privileged users was the very first recommendation. Fortunately privileged identity management software can make this step very practical to achieve.