The Identity Theft Resource Center has great news! 2009 is on pace for a 50 percent drop in the number of reported data breaches. With breaches plummeting like that it would seem we should chalk one up in the win column for information security. Well, not so fast.

As it turns out, while the total number of incidents has dropped steeply, the total number of personal records that have been compromised is around 220 million–an increase of more than 600 percent from 2008.

So, good news: the number of incidents is down; bad news: significantly more social security numbers, credit card numbers, sensitive medical records, and other personal information have been compromised. Organizations need to have security controls in place to both restrict sensitive data from being leaked as well as protecting the data where it is stored on the servers to ensure that these types of breaches don’t continue.