The Information Commissioner’s Office posted some stats on breach trends yesterday:
We use this page to show trends in statistics for data breaches reported to the ICO. We now have statistics for the first three quarters of this year, covering from April to December 2013.
The latest update shows the continued trend of more incidents, with 25 per cent more reported to the ICO in the third quarter of the year than the first. The types of breaches we are seeing reported are fairly consistent across the three quarters, with personal information being disclosed in error and lost or stolen paperwork and hardware prevalent.
As you’d expect, there’s plenty of guidance on these areas on our website:
The sector-by-sector shows the range of organisations dealing with reported data breaches. The health sector continues to report more incidents than any other, and provided 17 per cent more in the last three months of 2013 than in the previous quarter. It is important to view this in context though: the Government expects NHS organisations to self-report potential data breaches to the ICO, which means fewer go unreported. Also, the tool the NHS uses to report breaches has changed in recent months, and so we’ll be monitoring these figures to see what influence that will have.
See the statistics and analyses on the ICO’s site.