According to the 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report,22 more than 170 million records were compromised in 2012. Ninety-eight percent of the breaches stemmed from external agents. Significant...

According to the 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report,22 more than 170 million records were compromised in 2012. Ninety-eight percent of the breaches stemmed from external agents. Significant increases in the use of malware and hacking were particularly noteworthy, with 81 percent and 69 percent of attacks, respectively, using some form of hacking or the incorporation of malware. Most surprisingly, hacktivist groups only accounted for 3 percent of the data breaches. However, they topped the charts for effectiveness and efficiency, compromising more than 100 million records. This may herald the beginning of a new favorite in the field of data breaches. In December 2011, Antisec, a branch of Anonymous, hacked into global intelligence company Strategic Forecasting or Stratfor, for short. The hack resulted in the compromise of over 800,000 e-mails and 75,000 unencrypted credit card numbers and passwords. According to the Federal Bureau of Intelligence, the public posting of the information on the Internet resulted in over $700,000 of unauthorized charges to the compromised accounts. Jeremy Hammond, one of the alleged hackers, was arrested in March 2012 and charged with multiple felonies. In the same month, members of Th2 Consortium, a group claiming relationships with hactivist heavyweights Anonymous and LulzSec, hacked into their third pornsite in as many weeks. They emerged from Digital Playground .com with over 70,000 e-mail addresses, 82 of which had .gov or .mil domains. All three of the hacked Web sites are owned by Luxembourg-based adult entertainment company Manwin.