Perhaps more troublesome is the gap between the time it takes these attackers to steal data and the time it takes organizations to discover the incident. “Attackers are a lot faster than defenders. And the gap is actually widening,” Brannon said. “That’s probably where we as an industry need to focus our resources.”
Gap between time-to-compromise and time-to-detect (Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 2014).In contrast, the percentage of organizations that are able to detect incidents on their own without relying on third-party researchers and contractors is falling.
“That’s low, it’s staying low and may be getting lower,” Brannon said. “That’s an area where industry really needs to improve a lot.”
Although the media have spent an inordinate amount of time in 2013 discussing major data breaches involving retail stores and point-of-sale attacks, the Verizon data breach report shows that POS attacks continue to trend downward since 2011. Industries commonly hit by POS intrusions are restaurants, hotels, grocery stores and other brick-and-mortar retailers, where intruders attempt to capture payment card data.
“While POS breaches have been in the headlines lately, it is not indicative of the actual picture of cybercrime,” according to Verizon.
Cyber-espionage is up again, according to the 2014 report, representing a four-fold increase compared with the 2013 report. But the 511 incidents included in this year’s report is also partially due to a bigger dataset, according to Brannon. In addition, these attacks were found to be the most complex and diverse, with a long list of threat patterns. As it did last year, China still leads as the site of the most cyberespionage activity; but the other regions of the world are represented, including Eastern Europe with more than 20 percent.
Human error was among the most common causes of data loss and privacy breaches in the public sector. According to the Verizon data, “misdelivery” — sending paper documents or emails to the wrong recipient — is the most frequently seen error resulting in data disclosure.
“One of the more common examples is a mass mailing where the documents and envelopes are out of sync (off-by-one) and sensitive documents are sent to the wrong recipient,” the report states. “A mundane blunder, yes, but one that very often exposes data to unauthorized parties.”
Security incident patterns per industry. (Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 2014).
