
Good news, bad news: A look at the Cyber Incident and Breach Trends Report
The most recent Cyber Incident and Breach Trends Report from the Online Trust Alliance found that overall data breaches and exposed risks were down in 2018. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the news didn’t stop there.
According to the report, ransomware’s financial hit grew by 60% last year, losses from business email compromise attacks doubled. Meanwhile, cryptojacking incidents — when a device is commandeered so that its compute power can be exploited to mine cryptocurrency — tripled.
One truism in data security is that wherever new technologies emerge in popularity, valuable data, money, and crime will follow. With cryptocurrencies, there’s new technology, money flows, and crime — which is probably why the report found cryptojacking to have grown so rapidly.
The report found business email compromise losses doubled, and the $1.3 million loss in the report closely matches the $1.2 billion cost cited by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center that we reported on earlier this year. In these attacks, employees are tricked into sending money or store cards to fraudsters.
Any broad analysis of attack trends is certainly going to include passwords and access credentials, and this year the Online Trust Alliance found credential stuffing attacks rose considerably. Credential stuffing is when attackers take lists of known usernames and passwords (typically from previous breach data dumps) and apply them en mass against websites or other services. “Given that there are now more than 2.2 billion breached credentials in play and users often rely on identical logins across services, attackers are harnessing ultra-fast computers and known username/password pairs or commonly used passwords to gain access directly to accounts across a wide range of industries,” the Online Trust Alliance said in a statement.
Finally, attacks via software supply chains and other third-party-based breaches continue to grow and evolve. The report authors cited the Magecart attack as the most prominent third-party attack last year. Magecart infected payment forms at more than 6,000 e-commerce websites.
The Online Trust Alliance estimates that there was 78% rise in such attacks in 2018 and that half of all information security attacks involve the supply chain in some way.
The report shows that cybersecurity threats are truly fluid, and when technologies change and evolve, so do the targets cybercriminals set their sights on.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Cybersecurity Matters – DXC Blogs authored by Cybersecurity Matters. Read the original post at: https://blogs.dxc.technology/2019/07/23/good-news-bad-news-a-look-at-the-cyber-incident-and-breach-trends-report/