Brief highlights of the Verizon 2018 Data Breach Report

The latest Verizon 2018 Data Breach Report (11th edition) has been published and it’s certainly a great read. This year the data comes from over 53,000 incidents and 2,216 confirmed data breaches.

Based on the report, most of the data breaches are caused by outsiders (73%) with organised criminal groups accounting for 50% of the breaches.

It should not come as a surprise that as much as 58% of victims are SMB’s. They are very often most resource constrained in their security efforts and this trend continues to carry on. The healthcare industry is also a popular target to hackers, especially in United States of America where the data coming from healtcare breaches is very valuable.

Stolen credentials and phishing continue to be within top 5 action varieties in breaches. Unlike pretexting, which is financially motivated over 95% of the time, motives for phishing are split between financial (59%) and espionage (41%).

This is a very brief post and I highly encourage everyone interested to read the full report, available as a free download here.