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Helpful definitions and
chart guidance

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Hello, and welcome first-time readers! Before you get started on the 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), it might be a good idea to take a look at this section first. (For those of you who are familiar with the report, please feel free to jump over to the introduction.) We have been doing this report for a while now, and we appreciate that the verbiage we use can be a bit obtuse at times. We use very deliberate naming conventions, terms and definitions and spend a lot of time making sure we are consistent throughout the report. Hopefully this section will help make all of those more familiar.

VERIS Framework resources

The terms “threat actions,” “threat actors” and “varieties” will be referenced often. These are part of the Vocabulary for Event Recording and Incident Sharing (VERIS), a framework designed to allow for a consistent, unequivocal collection of security incident details. Here is how they should be interpreted:

Threat actor: Who is behind the event? This could be the external “bad guy” that launches a phishing campaign or an employee who leaves sensitive documents in their seat back pocket.

Threat action: What tactics (actions) were used to affect an asset? VERIS uses seven primary categories of threat actions: Malware, Hacking, Social, Misuse, Physical, Error and Environmental. Examples at a high level include hacking a server, installing malware or influencing human behavior through a social attack.

Variety: More specific enumerations of higher-level categories—e.g., classifying the external “bad guy” as an organized criminal group1 or recording a hacking action as SQL injection or brute force.

Learn more here:

https://github.com/vz-risk/dbir/tree/gh-pages/2023—includes DBIR facts, figures and figure data

https://verisframework.org—features information on the framework with examples and enumeration listings

https://github.com/vz-risk/veris—features information on the framework with examples and enumeration listings

Incident vs. breach

We talk a lot about incidents and breaches and we use the following definitions:

Incident: A security event that compromises the integrity, confidentiality or availability of an information asset.

Breach: An incident that results in the confirmed disclosure—not just potential exposure—of data to an unauthorized party. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, for instance, is most often an incident rather than a breach, since no data is exfiltrated. That doesn’t make it any less serious.

Industry labels

We align with the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard to categorize the victim organizations in our corpus. The standard uses two- to six-digit codes to classify businesses and organizations. Our analysis is typically done at the two-digit level, and we will specify NAICS codes along with an industry label. For example, a chart with a label of Financial (52) is not indicative of 52 as a value. “52” is the NAICS code for the Financial and Insurance sector. The overall label of “Financial” is used for brevity within the figures. Detailed information on the codes and the classification system is available here:

https://www.census.gov/naics/?58967?yearbck=2012

I’m sorry, this all happened when?

While we have always listed the following facts in our Methodology section (because that is where this type of information belongs), we decided to also mention it here for the benefit of those who don’t make it that far into the report. Each year, the DBIR timeline for in-scope incidents is from November 1 of one calendar year through October 31 of the next calendar year. Thus, the incidents described in this report took place between November 1, 2021, and October 31, 2022. The 2022 caseload is the primary analytical focus of the 2023 report, but the entire range of data is referenced throughout, notably in trending graphs. The time between the latter date and the date of publication for this report is spent in acquiring the data from our global contributors, anonymizing and aggregating that data, analyzing the dataset and, finally, creating the graphics and writing the report. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is the DBIR.

Being confident of our data

Starting in 2019 with slanted bar charts, the DBIR has tried to make the point that the only certain thing about information security is that nothing is certain. Even with all the data we have, we’ll never know anything with absolute certainty. However, instead of throwing our hands up and complaining that it is impossible to measure anything in a data-poor environment or, worse yet, just plain making stuff up, we get to work. This year, you’ll continue to see the team representing uncertainty throughout the report figures.

The examples shown in Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 all convey the range of realities that could credibly be true. Whether it be the slant of the bar chart, the threads of the spaghetti chart, the dots of the dot plot or the color of the pictogram plot, all convey the uncertainty of our industry in their own special way.

Much like the slanted bar chart, the spaghetti chart represents the same concept: the possible values that exist within the confidence interval; however, it’s slightly more involved because we have the added element of time. The individual threads represent a sample of all possible connections between the points that exists within each observation’s confidence interval. As you can see, some of the threads are looser than others, indicating a wider confidence internal and a smaller sample size.

The slanted bar chart will be familiar to returning readers. The slant on the bar chart represents the uncertainty of that data point to a 95% confidence level (which is standard for statistical testing).

In layman’s terms, if the slanted areas of two (or more) bars overlap, you can’t really say one is bigger than the other without angering the math gods.

2023 Data Breach Investigations Report
2023 Data Breach Investigations Report

The dot plot is another returning champion, and the trick to understanding this chart is to remember that the dots represent organizations. If, for instance, there are 200 dots (like in Figure 3), each dot represents 0.5% of organizations. This is a much better way of understanding how something is distributed among organizations and provides considerably more information than an average or a median. We added more colors and callouts to those in an attempt to make them even more informative.

The pictogram plot, our relative newcomer, attempts to capture uncertainty in a similar way to slanted bar charts but is more suited for a single proportion.

We hope they make your journey through this complex dataset even smoother than previous years.

2023 Data Breach Investigations Report
2023 Data Breach Investigations Report

Credit where credit is due

Turns out folks enjoy citing the report, and we often get asked how they should go about doing it.

You are permitted to include statistics, figures and other information from the report, provided that (a) you cite the source as “Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report” and (b) content is not modified in any way. Exact quotes are permitted, but paraphrasing requires review. If you would like to provide people a copy of the report, we ask that you provide them a link to verizon.com/dbir/ rather than the PDF.


Questions? Comments? Organizing a

bank run?

Let us know! Drop us a line at dbir@verizon.com, find us on LinkedIn, tweet @VerizonBusiness with #dbir. Got a data question? Tweet @VZDBIR!

If you are interested in becoming a contributor to the annual Verizon DBIR (and we hope you are), the process is very easy and straightforward. Please email us at dbircontributor@verizon.com.

¹ By organized criminal group, we mean a group that does this for a living and has a set process they use repeatedly, not Tony Soprano and his band of merry men.

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