Among the major highlights of the Verizon Cyber Espionage Report: criminal organizations and former employees play a trivial role in overall attempts, the overwhelming majority come from states.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
There are significant gaps in virtual appliance security, and many products are distributed with known, exploitable, and fixable vulnerabilities and on outdated or unsupported operating systems.
Despite the NSA warning of hackers exploiting bugs such as Bluekeep and Heartbleed vulnerabilities and updates being released, millions of vulnerable systems remained unpatched.
Report estimates that the cybersecurity workforce is still facing a shortfall in spite of a general improvement in 2020. Global growth would need to be at 89% to make up for it.
Hackers demanded $17 million in Compal's security breach despite its denial of the ransomware attack. Compal also claimed that its production lines were not affected.
Data breach of a popular online kids' game exposed personal details of 46 million users. The threat actor released 7 million records for free on a hacker forum.
Zoom will be required to make a number of significant changes to its security practices as a result of decisions that the FTC says ‘gave users a false sense of security.’
Today there's a big difference between safety and security. But in the coming era of autonomous vehicles, there will be no difference between the two as electronic security becomes more important.
Prestige Software exposed sensitive personal and credit card information of over 10 million clients and database with 5.8 million customer records from the RedDoorz breach was put on sale.
Ransomware attackers have ambitiously expanded their operations in the past year. Innovation continues as the Ragnar Locker Team is using Facebook Ads to pressure victims into paying up.










