Data breaches are on the rise worldwide, according to a survey undertaken by Verizon with cooperation from the Australian Federal Police and other High Tech Crime Units across the globe.

The recently released 2012 "Data Breach Investigations Report" found that corporate data theft reached 855 incidents and 174 million compromised records over the last year, up from 4 million in 2011. 

The vast majority of instance of corporate data theft come from external agents 88%, versus 4% that implicated internal employees. More than half (58%) of data theft was tied to activist groups. 

"While good old-fashioned greed and avarice were still the prime movers, ideological dissent and schadenfreude took a more prominent role across the caseload," note the report's authors.

"Incidents involving hacking and malware were both up considerably last year, with hacking linked to almost all compromised records. This makes sense, as these threat actions remain the favored tools of external agents, who, as described above, were behind most breaches. Many attacks continue to thwart or circumvent authentication by combining stolen or guessed credentials (to gain access) with backdoors (to retain access)."

The report notes that vulnerability is largely the driver of external data breaches.

"Findings from the past year continue to show that target selection is based more on opportunity than on choice. Most victims fell prey because they were found to possess an (often easily) exploitable weakness rather than because they were pre-identified for attack."

Some frightening statistics here:

- 92% of incidents were discovered by a third party (+6%)

- 97% of breaches were avoidable through simple or intermediate controls (+1%)

- 96% of victims subject to PCI DSS had not achieved compliance (+7%)

The full report is available HERE