Friends in Low Places? The 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report from Verizon

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Background Note: Gain vital cybersecurity insights from the analysis of over 23,000 incidents and 5,200 confirmed breaches from around the world and shared by Verizon in the 15th Annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Presented to help minimize risk and keep businesses safe, the results of this comprehensive report may be beneficial for cybersecurity, information governance, and legal discovery professionals operating in the eDiscovery ecosystem and seeking to better understand data breach problems, pulse rates, and projections.

Industry Report*

15th Annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report

By Gabriel Bassett, C. David Hylender, Philippe Langlois, Alex Pinto, and Suzanne Widup

Executive Summary Extract

As introduced in the 2018 report, the DBIR provides “a place for security practitioners to look for data-driven, real-world views on what commonly befalls companies with regard to cybercrime.” For this, our 15th-anniversary installment, we continue in that same tradition by providing insight into what threats your organization is likely to face today, along with the occasional look back at previous reports and how the threat landscape has changed over the intervening years.

Speaking of change, the past year has been extraordinary in a number of ways, but it was certainly memorable with regard to the murky world of cybercrime. From very well-publicized critical infrastructure attacks to massive supply chain breaches, the financially motivated criminals and nefarious nation-state actors have rarely, if ever, come out swinging the way they did over the past 12 months. As in past years, we will examine what our data has to tell us about these and other common action types used against enterprises. This year we looked at 23,896 incidents, 5,212 of which were confirmed breaches. This data represents actual real-world breaches and incidents investigated by the Verizon Threat Research Advisory Center (VTRAC) or provided to us by our 87 global contributors, without whose generous help this document could not be produced. We hope that you can use this report and the information it contains to increase your awareness of the most common tactics used against organizations at large and against your specific industry, and what you can do to protect your company and its assets. While we routinely compare and contrast trends in the report, this year, in honor of the 15th publication, we attempt as often as possible to illustrate how tactics have evolved over the years.

Key Takeaways

• There are four key paths leading to your estate: Credentials, Phishing, Exploiting vulnerabilities, and botnets. All four are pervasive in all areas of the DBIR, and no organization is safe without a plan to handle each of them.
• This year, ransomware has continued its upward trend with an almost 13% increase (for a total of 25% of breaches)—a rise as big as the past five years combined. It’s important to remember that, while ubiquitous and devastating, ransomware by itself is, at its core, a model of monetizing an organization’s access. Blocking the four key paths mentioned above helps to block the most common routes ransomware uses to invade your network.
• 2021 illustrated how one key supply chain breach can lead to wide-ranging consequences. Supply chain was involved in 61% of incidents this year. Compromising the right partner is a force multiplier for threat actors. Unlike a financially motivated actor, nation-state threat actors may skip the breach altogether and opt to simply leverage the access.
• Error continues to be a dominant trend and is responsible for 14% of breaches. This finding is heavily influenced by misconfigured cloud storage. While this is the second year in a row that we have seen a slight leveling out for this pattern, the fallibility of employees should not be discounted.
• The human element continues to drive breaches. This year, 82% of breaches involved the human element. Whether it is the Use of stolen credentials, Phishing, Misuse, or simply an Error, people continue to play a very large role in incidents and breaches alike.

Read the original overview.

 Executive Summary: 15th Annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (PDF) – Mouseover to Scroll

Read the original summary.

Complete Report: 15th Annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (PDF) – Mouseover to Scroll

Read the original report.

*Shared with direct express written permission from Verizon CEO for Communications, Office of the CEO.

Publication Source: Verizon. (2022). 15th Annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Verizon. Retrieved from https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/2022/dbir/2022-data-breach-investigations-report-dbir.pdf. [Accessed 6 June 2022]

Additional Reading

• [Annual Update] International Cyber Law in Practice: Interactive Toolkit
• Defining Cyber Discovery? A Definition and Framework

Source: ComplexDiscovery