Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2022

The DBIR was created to provide a place for security practitioners to look for data-driven, real-world views on what commonly befalls companies with regard to cybercrime. 

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 last 12 months. As always, we will examine what our data has to tell us about these and the other common action types used against enterprises. This year the DBIR team analyzed 23,896 security incidents, of which, 5,212 were confirmed data breaches.

There are four key paths leading to your estate: Credentials, Phishing, Exploiting vulnerabilities and Botnets. These four pervade all areas of the DBIR, and no organization is safe without a plan to handle them all.

This year Ransomware has continued its upward trend with an almost 13% increase–a rise as big as the last five years combined (for a total of 25% this year). It’s important to remember, Ransomware by itself is really just 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.