Security News

Verizon Communications is warning that an insider data breach impacts almost half its workforce, exposing sensitive employee information.A data breach notification shared with the Office of the Maine Attorney General reveals that a Verizon employee gained unauthorized access to a file containing sensitive employee information on September 21, 2023.

The importance of mapping CIS Controls to Verizon's incident classifications. The mapping of CIS Controls to Verizon's incident classifications presents organizations with an opportunity to optimize their security resources by aligning them with real-world security incidents.

The study, which tracked incidents occurring between November 1, 2021 and October 31, 2022, found that BEC attacks doubled and represented more than 50% of social engineering attacks. According to the study, the practice, which is commonly used in BEC attacks, doubled in volume compared to the prior year's.

Verizon Business today released the results of its 16th annual Data Breach Investigations Report, which analyzed 16,312 security incidents and 5,199 breaches. Chief among its findings is the soaring cost of ransomware - malicious software that encrypts an organization's data and extorts large sums of money to restore access.

Verizon has notified some prepaid customers that their accounts were compromised and their phone numbers potentially hijacked by crooks via SIM swaps. From there, the crooks could access the personal info in an account and perform a SIM swap.

Verizon warned an undisclosed number of prepaid customers that attackers gained access to Verizon accounts and used exposed credit card info in SIM swapping attacks. "Using the last four digits of that credit card, the third party was able to gain access to your Verizon account and may have processed an unauthorized SIM card change on the prepaid line that received the SMS linking to this notice. If a SIM card change occurred, Verizon has reversed it."

With the proliferation of mobile devices and hybrid work environments where employees often use their personal devices for work-related activities almost half of respondents of the Verizon Mobile Security Index 2022 said their organizations were subject to a security incident involving a mobile device that led to data loss, downtime or other negative outcome-a 22% increase over 2021's numbers. Despite these results, 36% of respondents said that mobile devices are of less interest to cybercriminals than other IT assets-an increase of six percentage points from the 2021 MSI report.

Ransomware and social engineering continue to dominate challenges facing cybersecurity professionals, according to Verizon's 15th annual Data Breach Investigations Report. In general, the results of DBIR merely confirm well-established trends, such as the growing threats of ransomware - up 13% this year - and the inescapability of the "Human element", which was tied to 82% of all breaches.

According to the US carrier's 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report released this week [PDF], ransomware accounted for 25 percent of the observed security incidents that occurred between November 1, 2020, and October 31, 2021, and was present in 70 percent of all malware infections. Ransomware outbreaks increased 13 percent year-over-year, a larger increase than the previous five years combined.

Ransomware, supply-chain threats and how organizations and their employees are their own worst enemy when it comes to security are some of the key takeaways of Verizon's annual report on the last 12 months of cyber-attacks. Some findings seem consistent with what the report has highlighted since its inception in 2008, one security professional observed.