Verizon released its informative annual Data Breach Investigations Report and Executive Summary covering - among other things - breach trends, vulnerabilities, and incident classification patterns based on an analysis of ~32,000 security incidents, of which 3,950 were confirmed breaches. Notably: (i) 86% of breaches were financially motivated; (ii) 70% were caused by outsiders; (iii) hacking and errors were the most common causes (45% and 22%, respectively); and (iv) ransomware accounted for 27% of all malware incidents (17% of breaches involved malware). The Executive Summary does a nice job of summarizing breach incident patterns and trends by industry and company size. The value comes in understanding the trends and identifying associated action steps to mitigate the risks.
See "Financial gain trumps espionage as top motivator in cyber attacks: report" (Reuters) and numerous additional resources on our Cybersecurity/Data Privacy page. This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!