The IT Nerd

Verizon has dropped their latest Data Breach Investigation Report, or DBIR. Here’s some key highlights: 

• Cost per ransomware incident doubled over the past two years, with ransomware accounting for one out of every four breaches.
• Pretexting (Business Email Compromise) has more than doubled since the previous year.
• The human element is involved in 3 out of 4 breaches.
• Analysis of the Log4j incident illustrates the scale of the incident and the effectiveness of the coordinated response.

Bhaven Panchal, Senior Director of Service Delivery, Cyware has this comment:

With the median costs of ransomware attacks doubling since last year and reaching the million-dollar range, the new Verizon DBIR once again highlights the upward inflationary trend of the cost of data breaches. Another striking revelation is the prevalence of the human element as the contributing factor behind breaches, whether it be through errors, privilege misuse, use of stolen credentials, or social engineering. It is imperative for organizations to accelerate their security processes and plug visibility gaps in their environments. The operationalization of threat intelligence, threat response automation, and security collaboration are going to help drive this change toward a more resilient cyberspace for all.

Roy Akerman, Co-Founder & CEO, Rezonate follows up with this:

Dependency on privileged identities and access in a cloud and SaaS dominated environment are a key indicator and enabler of the increase in Business Email Compromise. The attackers need to obtain access, making identity security more critical than ever. This aligns with the fact that the root cause of 74% of breaches were identity-related or enabled, which aligns with Verizon DBIR findings over the last decade. 

Identity remains the leading reason for security breaches, yet tools and tactics remain the same, and organizations struggle to deploy and further mature their identity security programs. A shift in approach is required – a holistic, automatic approach to identity management and trusted identities is important automatic approach to identity management and trusted identities is important now and will be for years to come.

This year’s DBIR should be required reading for any enterprise as it will provide a roadmap as to how to protect your enterprise from getting pwned by hackers.

UPDATE: Chad McDonald, CISO, Radiant Logic had this to say:

     “One alarming stat from the 2023 DBIR is the rise in Privilege Misuse and Fraudulent Transactions, up 10% from 2022. For trusted actors in an organization to conduct these fraudulent transactions, they must have a level of privilege that allows access. This means that either the employee’s privileges were not monitored, or the threat actor was able to steal coworkers’ credentials and misuse them to follow through with their ambitions. Either way, this should be an alarming realization to organizations that have neither the spare time nor money to safeguard their assets against their own trusted insiders. Organizations can address this issue by creating full visibility into all users and their access privileges in an approachable, user-friendly way. Once this is accomplished, IT teams can be set up to streamline the management process of identities and ensure access privileges are in the right hands–and quickly revoked when needed.”