Earnings remain the primary purpose of cybercrime, which increasingly affects companies 'cloud' and personal endowments, at a time when many are at home for the pandemic, with less protection on the front security. These are some of the reflections contained in Verizon's annual data breach investigation report 2020 which examines attacks in 81 countries around the world.
According to the research, almost 9 out of 10 violations (86%) are motivated by financial purposes. The majority of these continue to be caused by external actors - 70% - with organized crime accounting for 55%. Credential theft and attacks such as phishing and corporate email compromises cause most breaches (over 67%). Compared to the 2019 report, this highlights the doubling of cloud breaches, but ransomware has also seen a slight increase, detected in 27% of malware attacks (compared to 24% in 2019).
Furthermore, according to the report, phishing is the main threat to small organizations and accounts for over 30% of violations, followed by the use of stolen credentials (27%). Finally, with regard to the various sectors, in the manufacturing sector 23% of the attacks were caused by ransomware, compared to 61% in the public sector and 80% in education. The errors accounted for 33% of the violations in the public sector, but only 12% of those in the productive sector.