Helpful guidance

Each year, the DBIR timeline for in-scope incidents is from November 1 of one calendar year through October 31 of the next calendar year. Thus, the incidents described in this report took place between November 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The 2023 caseload is the primary analytical focus of the 2024 report, but the entire range of data is referenced throughout, notably in trending graphs. The time between the latter date and the date of publication for this report is spent in acquiring the data from our global contributors, anonymizing and aggregating that data, analyzing the dataset, and finally creating the graphics and writing the report. The jokes, sadly, do not write themselves.