Make no mistake: data thieves are everywhere. I sound like President Barack Obama. Where are these thieves? China is regarded by most experts as the locale where the most data theft occurs. Romania though is emerging as a new hotbed of data theft.

According to a recent report on global data theft, after China, the world’s biggest source of global data theft comes from inside the European Union. As reported in blogs.wsj.com.

Verizon Communications Inc.’s Data Breach Report 2013 found that more than a quarter of the world’s data thieves operated in Romania.

Some 28% of the hackers behind 47,000 data breaches investigated by Verizon were working from Romania. That was second only to China with 30%. By contrast only 18% of data thieves were acting out of the U.S. said the company. One of the good things we are not leading the planet in.

The report found that the majority of data thieves are not high-tech espionage agents, but rather petty criminals hacking for money and using rudimentary skills.

The focus on cash not politics meant that private businesses, not government, were the main target, with under 5% of attacks analyzed targeting the public sector.

Thieves steal corporate information for a variety of purposes. “If you steal quarterly earnings statements prior to announcement, and that has value to someone. If you have a process that your competitors don’t have — that process makes you more efficient or you have a larger market share because of that process, that has value.

Would mandatory stop theft classes globally help abate this growing problem? How do you feel? Do you think religious training would help or hinder the data theft issue?