Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Nation States and Affiliates Behind Rising Tide of Data Breaches

May 9, 2019

ZDNet reported May 8th on one of the most striking findings of Verizon's 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Cyberattacks by nation states and parties affiliated with them represented 23% of data breaches, up from 12% in 2018 and 19% in 2017.

The 12th annual data breach report was based on 41,000 cybersecurity incidents and more than 2,000 data breaches. At a high level, the DBIR report outlined the following:

  • A quarter of all breaches were associated with espionage;
  • C-level executives were 12x more likely to be the target of social incidents and 9x more likely to be a target of social breaches;
  • Ransomware is the No. 2 ranked malware type and accounts for 24% of cases;
  • Cybercriminals were targeting cloud-based email accounts and leveraging stolen credentials.

The nation-state actors and espionage takeaways highlight how the security threat game is changing in many respects. Espionage was an issue across most of the industries in the DBIR. Gabe Bassett, co-author of the Verizon DBIR, said companies need to plan for what happens after a data breach.

Bassett said companies are being targeted for intellectual property and secret theft by cybercriminals looking to leverage credentials instead of mapping a network and gaining access over time. "The theft of personal information and credentials is a primary vehicle is a different approach. The target is the same," said Bassett. Log-in information, social attacks and pretexting are primary techniques used to gain access to IP.

It is dismal indeed to know that roughly one quarter of data breaches come from nation states and their affiliates. Given the monies at their command, and their motives, I can only imagine that this percentage will increase.

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