July 29, 2013
Information is Beautiful recently put together a visual representation of the World's Largest Data Breaches, created in such a way that you can manipulate the visual by type of organization, method of leak, sensitivity of data, and year. You can instantly see changes to the visualization based on your desired filters - an amazing way to help distill data breach figures into a useful picture of the problem.
Looking at breaches of greater than 30,000 records allows us to spot patterns we might otherwise miss. This image, for example, shows data breaches clustered by method of leak, with the blue bubbles indicating lost/stolen computers. If you then toggle to data sensitivity as a measure, instead of number of records stolen, the bubbles for lost/stolen devices get larger in almost all instances. This seems to suggest is that mobile devices (laptops, tablets, mobile devices) are more likely to contain very sensitive information. An interesting insight.
Did you find any interesting insights from this visualization?
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