Security News > 2021 > May > Verizon: Pandemic Ushers in ⅓ More Cyber-Misery

This year's DBIR analyzed 5,258 breaches from 83 contributors in 88 countries: about a third more breaches than were analyzed last year.

In last year's report, DBIR forecast a possible increase in phishing, use of stolen credentials, ransomware and misconfiguration breaches.

Spear-phishers have jumped on the quarantined population to pump up the volume: Phishing frequency in the past year has played a part in 36 percent of breaches, up from 25 percent last year.

James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, noted that phishing or other social-engineering campaigns have turned up as the initial attack vector for breaches for the past several years.

Akamai itself has analyzed the effect of the pandemic on traffic and attack patterns multiple times in the last year, he noted via email on Thursday.

"Misconfigurations make up the largest percentage of miscellaneous errors causing breaches. It might be more fun to spend resources on the latest AI-driven threat-hunting tool, but implementing configuration management and change detection will go a long way in maintaining the integrity of your digital assets," Erlin said.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/verizon-pandemic-cyber-misery/166168/