Security News > 2022 > January > Healthcare industry most common victim of third-party breaches last year

Ransomware was the most common attack method behind third-party breaches in 2021, initiating more than one out of four incidents analyzed.

Despite immense cybersecurity improvements following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry was the most common victim of attacks caused by third parties, accounting for 33% of incidents last year.

With its rich and diverse personally-identifiable information data, the government sector accounted for 14% of third party attacks in 2021.

Exploitations of software vulnerabilities have led to some of the most notable attacks over the last few years, including the 2020 SolarWinds attack.

Kevin Novak, Managing Director, Breakwater Solutions: "By attacking third parties, attackers gain the benefit of hitting an aggregated target; particularly when they can compromise the product being provided by that third partya software package that then gets distributed to end-users for instance. It's no wonder why the supply-chain vector has increased so broadly as a preferred target of cyber-attacks. Suppliers are data rich and have significant impetus to pay ransoms lest they lose customers who are paying for their services to remain online and for their data to remain secure."

Aimei Wei, CTO, Stellar Cyber: "Our findings align with what the report discovered. Organizations have never adopted third party software at today's speed due to the huge productivity improvement or the enablement brought in by this software. With the benefits comes the security threat from the increased attack surface. It is very challenging to ensure each one of them is vulnerability free, especially with the dynamic software upgrade, it is not future proof even if a software is vulnerability free today. The more practical way to fight this battle is to have a security monitoring system that can protect your entire attack surface dynamically by detecting any suspicious behaviors."

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/01/28/third-party-breach-2021/