The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform recently published its bi-annual Infromation Security Breaches survey (HP is a contributor).

There is some good news.

• 84% [of companies surveyed] are heavily dependent on their IT systems
• 81% believe their board gives a high or very high priority to information security
• 77% see protecting customer data as very important

But the bad news is that computer incidents are widespread among large companies (over 500 people).

• 96% have had a security incident int he preceding year
• In fact, they had, on average, 400
• The average cost of the worst incident was £1-2m

And there are still weak spots such as instant messaging and encryption.

The Get Safe Online blog continues the theme, for example in this post about data loss.