Over half of German organisations 'suffer data breach in last year'

2009-09-17

Over half (53 per cent) of German organisations have suffered at least one data breach in the past 12 months, research has shown. This represents an increase of more than 55 per cent on the figure for last year, which stood at 34 per cent.

The results form part of the 2009 Annual Study: German Enterprise Encryption Trends, carried out by the Ponemon Institute and commissioned by the PGP Corporation. Of the 490 IT and security practitioners polled, 27 per cent of who have roles at managerial level or above.

Of the 53 per cent that had suffered at least one data breach, only five per cent reported all of the incidents, while 14 per cent disclosed their information losses. This means that 81 per cent of data breach incidents were not publicly reported.

The report pointed out that changes in the Data Protection Act mean that companies are obliged to publicly report data losses. These alterations came into force at the start of September.

"This year's report show that companies continue to use encryption solutions, to safeguard sensitive internal information such as customer and employee data. What will be interesting to track is how new German law will affect the use of encryption this next year and whether we will see more notifications of data loss from German organisations as a result," said Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

Other figures from the research revealed that 82 per cent of German firms and organisations ranked data protection as an important or very important part of their risk management efforts, while encryption technologies were used by nearly all surveyed.

Recent research from the Ponemon Institute, again commissioned by PGP Corporation, revealed that over two-thirds (67 per cent) of French organisations had to deal with one or more data breach incident in the past 12 months.

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