Apparent wave of cyber breaches is an illusion

A proliferation of hacktivists and frustration with cleanup costs are prompting agencies and companies to disclose breaches they would have kept under wraps in the past, Internet security researchers say. While it may seem that cyber crooks are poking into databases more frequently based on increased media coverage, the fact is that government and corporate networks have been under constant assault for years, the researchers note.

"There are those that have been hacked and those that do not know they have been hacked -- there are really only two groups," said Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee Labs, the research division of the computer security firm. "When we do an investigation, 99 percent of the time we're forced to sign a [nondisclosure agreement]" so word of the incident does not surface. He attributes the recent rise in reports of network intrusions to publicity-seeking perpetrators that have become more organized during the past year.