A "2008 Data Breach Investigations Report" from Verizon Business finds that nearly nine out of ten business data breaches could have been prevented through reasonable security measures.The report (PDF) is based on more than 500 investigations conducted over the past four years. In addition to the preventability findings, the report states that 73 percent of the breaches studied resulted from external sources, and most were due to a combination of events rather than a single hack or intrusion.

For prevention, the study recommends simple actions performed diligently, such as:

- Make sure that established security policies are implemented. - Create a data retention plan, and know where data resides. - Wall off data if necessary. - Create an incident response plan, and test it.

Dr. Peter Tippett, vice president of research and intelligence for Verizon Business Security Solutions, said, "This report clearly shows it's not about clever or complex security protection measures. It really boils down to doing the basics from planning to implementation to monitoring of the data."Yahoo Finance