The human element is driving breaches

It's the human factor!

The new Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report 2023 (DBIR) is out and offers some interesting insights:

• overall, the vast majority of breaches are caused by the human element: stolen credentials or phishing accounts for 3/4 of breaches. This underscores the importance of continuous security awareness training and phishing resistant multifactor authentication (see here).

• the remaining is mostly down to exploitations of software vulnerabilities, which are actually becoming slightly less visible.

• organized crime and financial motives are the main driver of breaches. Nation-state sponsored attacks are actually relatively infrequent, even less prominent than internal users' misuse or errors (remember, complexity breeds errors and increases risks).

• a ransomware element is present in roughly 1/4 of all breaches, with the most frequent delivery vector being email.

Full Verizon DBIR 2023 report available here: https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/