BreachExchange mailing list archives
Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study
From: Bill Yurcik <byurcik () ncsa uiuc edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:54:39 -0500 (CDT)
Adam: not much to confuse really, in the clip from the paper below the authors say the breach events were either lost from archives or they did not search well enough or media selection of which events to report is an explanation, well the simple fact is breach events were not being reported in the media to be found by the authors prior to the state breach disclosure laws which recently were legislated. thus the authors miss this primary point that breach events were not being announced by organizations to then be reported by the media. its a simple point but a dominant one that would appear to explain the dearth of events used in their study upon which they later make claims.
*zero* breaches each year for the years 1988-91, 1993-94; less than 10 breaches each year from 1995-1999; and less than 25 breaches each year from 2000-2004.
Chris Walsh and I just had a thread on dataloss where we agreed that *even with* the recent data from state breach disclosure laws it is still hard to make general claims about breach disclosures although the situation is better with the data not worse. Cheers! - Bill Yurcik On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Adam Shostack wrote:
On "page 22 of 31," starting from line 37: Several factors might explain the pattern of increasing incidents and volume of compromised data over time. First, there is the possibility that the results are skewed due to the relative growth of new, fresh news stories devoted to this issue, and the loss of older stories that disappeared from news archives as time passed. Perhaps there have always been hundreds of incidents every year, but only in recent years has the severity of the problem been reported in the news. If this were the case, we would expect to see a gradually decaying pattern with greater number of reported cases in 2006 than in 2005, 2004, and so on. However, the dramatic difference in reported incidents between later years and early years suggests that this effect does not adequately explain ... So I'm confused by your claim that they don't recognize the issue.
On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 05:35:33PM -0500, Bill Yurcik wrote: | | the authors did not identify (maybe because they did not recognize) how | incredibly bad their data is (years of data that are not even close), | they then went on to make bold claims! trash-in trash-out
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Current thread:
- seriously flawed U Washington breach study gets press making claims Bill Yurcik (Mar 14)
- Electronic Copiers Now Potential Source of Identity Theft DAIL, ANDY (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study gets press making claims B.K. DeLong (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study getspress making claims James Childers (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study gets press making claims Adam Shostack (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Bill Yurcik (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Adam Shostack (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Bill Yurcik (Mar 15)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Jim Neister (Mar 15)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Adam Shostack (Mar 15)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Bill Yurcik (Mar 14)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Chris Walsh (Mar 15)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Bill Yurcik (Mar 15)
- Re: seriously flawed U Washington breach study Nash, Kim (Mar 15)