Verizon Data Breach Report 2012

The Verizon Data Breach Report 2012 (pdf) has been released. The information security industry owes Verizon gratitude for the amount of data Verizon has been able to assemble and analyze, and for making the results publicly available.

Unsurprisingly, the total number of records breached in 2011 was quite large. The majority of the breaches were motivated by "hacktivism" rather than illicit financial gains, but Verizon points out that serious criminals are still actively stealing data.

Regardless of the motivations by attackers, 2011 was a terrible year for the number of breaches and the amount of data lost.

RSA Conference 2012 Post-mortem

This year, my schedule at the RSA Conference 2012 was much different than previous conferences. As a speaker, I spent quite a bit of time preparing and rehearsing my presentation, as well as talking with other presenters. Of course, audiences get a lot out of the presentations and meeting the presenters afterwards, but it's a step up to be able to meet and talk with presenters informally about the industry, security issues and solutions for customers, and the direction of technologies.

Looking back at the past year and the significant number of huge data loss events, I thought I saw that people were looking to step up their game against breaches. I liked what I heard from industry industry leaders - concepts with the potential to improve data security: 1) better communication and interaction between software development and operations, such as Josh Corman and Gene Kim's Rugged DevOps talk, 2) improving security functionality for cloud - Chris Hoff and Rich Mogul's Grilling Cloudicorns talk, and 3) improving mobile device security.

I'm looking forward to digging into these ideas further in the coming year.