A confluence of circumstances have led to an explosion of security breaches in corporations over the past year, according to a study by Canadian security researchers. The number of breaches tripled the 2008 findings in a survey of 600 Canadian IT security professionals.

The report also indicates increased costs associated with the breaches, but I am congenitally skeptical of dollar amounts assigned to security problems. There are a lot of ways to estimate the cost of a breach and most of them are susceptible to inflation. The fact that there is real monetary damage associated with many breaches is unchallenged, however.

The rising number of events is explained by researcher Walid Hejazi as an outgrowth of lower IT budgets (respondents indicated an average decrease of 10%) and staff who are more willing to skirt the law to steal valuable information when they feel their own positions to be insecure. Indeed, this very phenomena was hinted at in employee surveys conducted almost a year ago as the crisis was just getting into gear, with 70% of staff indicating they would breach corporate security to look for data that might improve their chances of holding their position, and a whopping 60% saying they would download and take valuable proprietary information with them in the event they were terminated.

Internal threats have always been the most significant, but also among the least addressed. It appears that this lack of attention has resulted in serious damages in many firms that didn't heed the warnings.