Verizon DBIR 2019 analysis

Introduction

The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is now an annual festival of cybersecurity analysis. The 2019 report used data from 41,686 security incidents across 2,013 data confirmed breaches. from both public and private entities, across 86 countries. 

These data allow Verizon into the mind of the cybercriminal to see what has been going on the past 12 months. From this, they can also make informed and quantitative analyses of what may happen next in the world of cybersecurity.

DBIR 2019 main findings

One of the key findings of the report is this, taken from the DBIR report brief:

“The most important defense is knowledge.”

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Bearing this in mind, let’s look at some of the main findings that came out of the 2019 DBIR report.

The report focuses on nine classification areas, as shown below. This year, however, the report also includes a subsection of financially motivated social engineering (FMSE) attacks. These attacks focus on credential theft and money transfer to accounts controlled by cybercriminals.

The nine classes of attack

1. Crimeware
2. Cyber-espionage
3. Denial of Service
4. Insider and privilege misuse
5. Miscellaneous errors
6. Payment card skimmers
7. Point of sale intrusions
8. Physical theft and loss
9. Web application attacks 

Each has their own subsections. There is also a tenth category, “everything else,” into which anything that doesn’t fit into the nine above is placed. Verizon has been using these nine categories since 2014, and in the 2019 report, they still fit 98.5% of security incidents and 88% of data breaches.

Some interesting findings from the 2019 DBIR include:

The good news

• Hardly any cryptomining bots were reported (around 2% of malware). This is probably because of the fall in cryptocurrency value
• W2 tax form scams were almost non-existent in the DBIR data. Consequently, attacks targeting Human Resource departments were six (Read more...)