Verizon's first report of 2009 is the 4th such report published publicly by Verizon (they have performed 28 such analyses to-date, but only recently decided to go public with them). Verizon's goal is to release these reports on a roughly quarterly basis going forward.
The report largely focuses on breaches occurring in the 2008 calendar year, but does reference data gathered from prior years. The 2008 year saw an unprecidented number of records compromised. Verizon alone responded to breaches representing 285 million records, more than all prior years (2004-2007) combined, and those are the focus of this report.
The Actors
I think we can...