What a decade of data breach investigations can teach us

George Nott has a good summary of some of the key findings in Verizon’s newest Data Breach Investigations Report. Some snippets:

This year’s report – described by Verizon as an “InfoSec coddiwomple that has now culminated in a decade of nefarious deeds and malicious mayhem” – includes analysis on 42,068 incidents and 1,935 breaches from 84 countries.

[…]

Social attacks were utilised in 43 per cent of all the breaches in Verizon’s latest dataset, representing more than 1600 incidents and more than 800 breaches.

Phishing was the most common type of social attack, found in more than 90 per cent of both incidents and breaches. Successful phishing trips led to software installation in 95 per cent of cases.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight a point Protenus and this site have been making each month in Protenus’s monthly Breach Barometer reports. Nott reports:

For the first time, the Verizon report analysed breaches per sector. The top three industries for data breaches are financial services (24 per cent); healthcare (15 per cent) and the public sector (12 per cent).

Key differences between sectors stand out. Insider misuse, for example, proves to be a major issue for the healthcare industry; the only industry where employees are the predominant threat actors in breaches.

Read more on Computerworld.  To obtain the DBIR, trot on over to Verizon’s site.