Greetings! Welcome to the 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)! We always appreciate you, our readers, but this year we would like to say thank you for just showing up. Thanks for simply making it through the often frightening and always unpredictable dystopian wasteland that was 2020, and still having enough interest and energy to care about making the world a safer place. By the time you read this, it is devoutly to be hoped that we have moved on to a place of relative safety, somewhere beyond Thunderdome if you will.