Every year, Verizon releases its Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR), which tracks data breaches and the methods that hackers use to enter networks. What follows are the key takeaways relevant to our community:
- Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks have grown swiftly and now represent over 50% of social engineering attacks. BEC attacks are typically when an email, supposedly coming from a trusted source, directs someone to make a funds transfer to an account.
- 74% of Breaches have a human element due to “Error, Privilege, Misuse, Use of stolen credentials or Social Engineering.” Once again this reinforces the importance of cybersecurity training.
- Ransomware is holding steady at 24% of all breaches.
- Over 80% of attacks were focused on server data.
- The median cost of a ransomware attack was $26.000.
- It was interesting to note that there was no difference in the prevalence of attack victims between large and small firms.
To access the report, follow this link: https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/T1a6/reports/2023-data-breach-investigations-report-dbir.pdf