Where did the breach go?

Where on earth did the breach go? We've asked ourselves, we've asked others, and we've been asked by many. The simple answer is, we don't know! It could be anything, really, that has caused the dramatic decline in reported data loss incidents in 2009. Here are a few ideas: <ul> <li>The decline is media related. Data breaches are 'passé'.</li> <li>Organizations are implementing better security.</li> <li>Organizations aren't reporting incidents.</li> <li>Solar Flares</li> </ul> None of these, with the exception of solar flares, is likely to be analyzable at first glance. But what about the first bullet? Due to a lack in expertise of space weather, we decided to dive into the <a href="http://news.google.com/archivesearch" target="_blank">Google News archives</a>, and things became interesting. Google News' timeline feature facilitates this kind of analysis. We looked through search result totals matching the query "data breach", per month, for 72 months (2004 through 2009). We then tossed the data into a graph, added a polynomial trend-line with an order of 6, and took a deep breath. [<a href="http://datalossdb.org/where_did_it_go">read on and see the graphs here on this special page</a>]