Reaching out to share 2018 breach trends research from F5 Networks which explores the relationship between business models and breach vectors. This research is part of the 2019 application protection report, which is being released in a series of short, focused research segments rather than the lengthier report of years’ past.
Notable takeaways include:
- Phishing was the single greatest threat to applications, responsible for 21% of breaches with a known root cause. Injection for payment card skimming was responsible for about 12% of breaches, pointing to the two weakest links on the internet—people and PHP-based payment card forms.
- The industry profiles corresponded to the two most common breach causes: organizations that accept payment cards on the web, and organizations with identity data usable for fraud.
- Retail saw a disproportionately high rate of compromise by injection, with 72% of attributable breaches coming from that vector.
- Identity data attracted phishing and email breaches: Malware and insider threats played a bigger role in the accounting sector, and accidents or physical breaches were more prevalent in finance, health, education and non-profit.
These trends make sense from the standpoint of how organizations in different sectors tend to store and transmit valuable assets, reinforcing the point that there is no one-size fits all security program. Risk assessment needs to be a cornerstone of any security program, and the first step is a substantive and ongoing inventory process.
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