Clinic Obtains Data on Security Breaches at BanksA recent Gartner study, authored by Avivah Litan, Phishing Attacks Escalate, Morph and Cause Considerable Damage, finds that phishing attacks rose in 2007, costing the economy $3.2 billion. The report in part relies upon data obtained by the Clinic through Freedom of Information Act Requests. These requests sought data from federal banking agencies on security breaches. Data released from the FDIC (PDF | XLS) and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (PDF) indicate that the federal agencies are not tracking breaches in a consistent or useful way. As Gartner stated in the press release accompanying the study, the data shows serious shortcomings in regulators’ surveillance system: Ms. Litan said bank regulators appear to be in the dark when it comes to measuring damage from phishing attacks. The University of California at Berkeley conducted a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for all bank-reported data on fraud attacks between January 27, 2005 and May 30, 2007. Gartner and UC Berkeley analyzed these data and found spotty, unreliable and unstructured data reported by U.S. banks to the regulator. Just 451 unique incidents were reported in this period. “The data quality was so poor that it was impossible to draw any conclusions from it other than that the regulatory reporting on fraud attacks is severely lacking,” Ms. Litan said.
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