2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) Key Takeaways

The 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) was released today, and I was lucky enough to be handed a hot off the press physical copy while at the Global Cyber Alliance Cyber Trends 2019 event at Mansion House, London. For me, the DBIR provides the most insightful view on the evolving threat landscape, and is the most valuable annual “state of the nation” report in the security industry.

Global Cyber Alliance Cyber Trends 2019

The DBIR has evolved since its initial release in 2008, when it was payment card data breach and Verizon breach investigations data focused. This year’s DBIR involved the analysis of 41,686 security incidents from 66 global data sources in addition to Verizon. The analysed findings are expertly presented over 77 pages, using simple charts supported by ‘plain English’ astute explanations, reason why then, the DBIR is one of the most quoted reports in presentations and within industry sales collateral.

DBIR 2019 Key Takeaways

• Financial gain remains the most common motivate behind data breaches (71%)
• 43% of breaches occurred at small businesses
• A third (32%) of breaches involved phishing
• The nation-state threat is increasing, with 23% of breaches by nation-state actors
• More than half (56%) of data breaches took months or longer to discover
• Ransomware remains a major threat, and is the second most common type of malware reported
• Business executives are increasingly targeted with social engineering, attacks such as phishing\BEC
• Crypto-mining malware accounts for less than 5% of data breaches, despite the publicity it didn’t make the top ten malware listed in the report
• Espionage is a key motivation behind a quarter of data breaches
• 60 million records breached due to misconfigured cloud service buckets
• Continued reduction in payment card point of sale breaches
• The hacktivist threat remains low, the increase of hacktivist attacks report in DBIR 2012 report appears to be a one-off spike