According to Verizon's annual data breach report released Wednesday, attacks that relied on exploiting vulnerabilities as a primary route to breach increased by an astonishing 180% last year compared to the previous year. This was mainly caused by the massive MOVEit hack.
Alex Pinto, who led the Verizon team that created the report, said that the increase was due to the use of zero-day vulnerabilities by ransomware attackers, citing a type of previously unknown vulnerability. ” “A prime example of what everyone was talking about last year was the MoveIt vulnerability.”
Verizon was able to identify 1,567 infringement notices related to the MOVEit file transfer service. According to some estimates, this was the biggest attack of last year and possibly the largest ransomware attack campaign in history.
The impact is in stark contrast to the impact of the type of log4j vulnerability that Verizon predicted in a report last year, which raised dire warnings at the time but ended up having somewhat limited impact. finished.
A possible explanation for this difference is that log4j is ubiquitous enough that even mature enterprises organize extensive efforts to counter vulnerabilities, whereas MOVEit is “I don't think it went too far.” said Pinto, associate director of threat intelligence at Verizon Business. Notably, the education sector, which is considered the least equipped to prevent cyber-attacks, is the sector most affected.
This wasn't the only conclusion of the annual encyclopedic Verizon Data Breach Report, which analyzed more than 10,000 breaches and 30,000 security incidents from a variety of sources and collaborators. This report analyzes everything from how insider threats and user error cause breaches to attacks broken down by industry.
One area that did not go well was the impact of artificial intelligence on data breaches.
“While we have paid close attention to signs of the use of the emerging field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in attacks and the potential impact of those technologies, we have Nothing materialized in the incident data,” the report states. That's likely due to the fact that many existing attack methods “do not need to be more sophisticated to be successful against their targets,” the report suggests.