A new study found that the majority of all data breach incidents were down to hacking attacks.
The Flashpoint report found that of all data breach incidents reported during the first half of the year, six out of ten (60%) were due to a “hack” – where a person (or group) gains access to a company’s systems without permission.
In total, nearly 2,000 data breaches were reported worldwide in the first half of 2022, which is definitely not the exact number of incidents. What’s important about this report, however, is that the number of misconfiguration incidents fell by nearly 50% year-over-year, from 27.3 to 1.4 billion records.
Insider attacks
The report also discusses the dangers of insider attacks. By all accounts, only 23% of all incidents with a confirmed origin occurred from insiders, and of that number, two-thirds (61%) were the result of data processing errors.
A total of 54 breaches were confirmed as insider-related, with some relatively painless for the company (credit card theft at a point of sale) and some downright horrific (proprietary source code theft and the like).
Insider attacks are often described as one of the biggest threats to companies. Sometimes they are intentional (when a disgruntled employee seeks to directly harm the company), but more often they are just the result of an honest mistake or negligence (eg data loss (opens in a new tab) by email, sending it to the wrong address, losing external drives, smartphones and laptops or similar).
This forces organizations to not only minimize network impact, but also increase efforts to stop unauthorized access as much as possible.
Flashpoint says they can achieve this goal by improving their intelligence gathering efforts, strengthening their systems and conducting regular audits.
https://www.techradar.com/news/unsurprisingly-most-data-breaches-are-caused-by-hacking/
