Verizon have published their comprehensive annual breach investigations report today. Their analysis makes for interesting reading, for example they point out that a whopping 86% of breaches were discovered by outside third parties, and not by the victim organization internally. The chart on top of page 55/56 in the report shows, quite compellingly, the average time spans between "intrusion" and "compromise", as well as between "compromise" and "discovery". The former is in minutes to days, the latter in weeks to months.  As for the cause of the breaches:  "Exploitation of default or guessable credentials" is in the top three.  Kinda where Cliff Stoll was already at, 20 years ago.