ARCHIVED CONTENT
You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract from article by Doug Austin
Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report doesn’t waste any time providing useful statistics regarding the state of data breaches – they state right on the cover of the report that “89% of breaches had a financial or espionage motive.” Honestly, I’m surprised it’s not higher.
Another notable stat is that “63% of confirmed data breaches involved weak, default or stolen passwords.” As we noted when covering last year’s report, almost thirty percent of data security incidents were due to human error, so it’s not surprising that password breaches are a major cause of data breaches. Though a lot of the instances of stolen credentials were due to the Dridex botnet (which is banking malware that leverages macros in Microsoft Office to infect systems and steals banking credentials). In addition to stolen credentials, other malware, phishing, and keyloggers are other top threats.