Security studies are released on a daily basis, and there is an industry trend that is already focused on increasing awareness of data breaches.
One of the latest reports comes from Intel Security , which provides data collected from 1,155 organizations around the world related to data breaches, today’s hot security topic.
According to Intel, most of these breaches occur due to external factors in 57% of cases. When an internal factor is responsible, 21% of breaches occur due to an accident, while 22% are intentional.
In most data breaches, attackers target customer and employee information, with less emphasis on intellectual property and financial information. In the majority of cases, both internal and external actors primarily target Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), followed by CSV and plain text files (usually database dumps), PDFs, audio and video files, and XML data. The funny thing is, while most of us think of a sophisticated cyber-espionage or hacking attack when we think of a data breach, Intel’s report confirms that in 40% of cases, data was stolen along with the actual, physical device. The favorite targets are laptops, tablets, and USB drives, followed by smartphones, printouts, CDs/DVDs, microphones, cameras, and fax machines. When hackers decide to use digital highways to hack into a company’s network, they typically prefer Web protocols (such as HTTP), followed by FTP, email, P2P, SSH, and VPN. Intel’s Grand Theft Data report also covers cloud infrastructure, which is becoming more common in more companies every year. According to their research, one in three data breaches occurred on a cloud server.
