Verizon Released the 2023 Annual Data Breach Investigation Report
Verizon released the 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which is based on information from incidents investigated by the Verizon Threat Research Advisory Center. The DBIR is one of the most watched reports in the cybersecurity industry because it is based on the analysis of a large number of real events. The 2023 DBIR report analyzed 16,312 security incidents and 5,199 data breaches.
According to the FBI, the average cost of a ransomware incident has more than doubled in the past two years to $26,000, according to the report. Losses were reported in only 7% of cases, with victims losing $1-2.25 million. According to the description in the report, financial services and manufacturing are currently the hardest-hit industries.
The report notes that while the data shows that ransomware amounts are low, the overall cost for businesses to recover from ransomware incidents is increasing. This fact points to a downward trend in the size of companies of ransomware victims. Ransomware accounted for 24 percent of the cybersecurity incidents Verizon analyzed, and there have been more ransomware attacks in the past two years than in the previous five years combined.
Main Contents Of The Report
Engineering attacks are often very effective and extremely lucrative for cybercriminals. Perhaps this is why Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks (which are in essence pretexting attacks) have almost doubled across our entire incident dataset, as can be seen in Figure 5, and now represent more than 50% of incidents within the Social Engineering pattern.
74% of all breaches include the human element, with people being involved either via Error, Privilege Misuse, Use of stolen credentials, or Social Engineering. 83% of breaches involved External actors, and the primary motivation for attacks continues to be overwhelmingly financially driven, at 95% of breaches. The three primary ways in which attackers access an organization are stolen credentials, phishing, and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Ransomware continues its reign as one of the top Action types present in breaches, and while it did not actually grow, it did hold statistically steady at 24%. Ransomware is ubiquitous among organizations of all sizes and in all industries.
More than 32% of all Log4j scanning activity over the course of the year happened within 30 days of its release (with the biggest spike of activity occurring within 17 days).
Log4j was so top-of-mind in our data contributors’ incident response that 90% of incidents with Exploit vuln as an action had “Log4j,” or “CVE-2021- 44228” in the comments section. However, only 20.6% of the incidents had comments.
IT Security Awareness Training
The report highlights that human error is still the leading cause of data breaches. The data and information security of an enterprise are closely related to every employee. In your daily work, you need to be vigilant against phishing emails, phishing Wi-Fi, and various rogue software, and maintain a high degree of vigilance.
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