It seems that everywhere you turn this year, there’s news of another data breach. Sometimes it’s a laptop stolen, other times it’s hackers compromising a database. No matter how they occur, each breach leads to someone’s identity being exposed. Whether or not this exposure leads to identity theft, there’s no doubt that the risk involved, and the frequency that these breaches are occurring makes data breaches one of the top security issues of 2012.

In this month’s Symantec Intelligence Report, we examine the types of data that is often stolen during a data breach. It turns out the most commonly stolen information is more personal than you might first expect: a person’s real name is more likely to be stolen than a username or password.

Overall, the median number of identities stolen per breach continues to rise this year, and is now up to 8,404. This is up significantly from when we last looked at data breaches back in August, when the median for the year to date was only 6,800 identities per breach.

We also take a look at spam during this holiday season. We’ve noticed that spammers are using the holidays as a means to entice users to check out the wares they’re peddling, in much the same way they have in years past.

There has also been an increase in the size of spam email messages this month—messages 10kb and larger are up 21 percent, from 17.3 percent in October to 38.3 percent of all spam email in November. We take a look at why this is, and what we see in store for the rest of the month.

All this and more is contained in this month’s edition of the Symantec Intelligence Report, which is now available.