Quote:Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks have spiked over the past year, while cyber-espionage campaigns have spiraled downwards. That’s according to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) released Tuesday, which analyzed 32,002 security incidents and 3,950 data breaches across 16 industry verticals.
Notably, this year DoS attacks increased in number (13,000 incidents) and were also seen as a bigger part of cybercriminals’ toolboxes (DoS attacks made up 40 percent of security incidents reported), beating out crimeware and web applications. While DoS attacks use differing tactics, they most commonly involve sending junk network traffic to overwhelm and crash systems. It doesn’t help that cybercriminals have been creating new and dangerous botnets to launch DoS attacks, like Kaiji or Mirai variants, over the past few years.
“While the amount of this traffic is increasing as mentioned, in DDoS, we don’t just look at the number of attacks that are conducted,” said researchers. “We also look at the bits per second (BPS), which tells us the size of the attack, and the packets per second (PPS), which tells us the throughway of the attack. What we found is that, regardless of the service used to send the attacks, the packet-to-bit ratio stays within a relatively tight band and the PPS hasn’t changed that much over time, sitting at 570 Mbps for the most common mode.”
Cyber espionage attacks meanwhile have seen a downward spiral, dropping from making up 13.5 percent of breaches in 2018 to a mere 3.2 percent of data breaches in 2019. That may come as a surprise given that espionage campaigns were actually on the rise in the 2019 Verizon DBIR. In addition, a slew of cyber espionage campaigns (such as ones targeting the WHO, several governments in the Asia-Pacific region and more) were unearthed over the past year – but researchers say under reporting may be a factor in the dipping statistics.
“The drop in raw numbers could be due to either under-reporting or failure to detect these attacks, but the increase in volume of the other patterns is very much responsible for the reduction in percentage,” said researchers.
In fact, financially motivated breaches continue to not only be more common than espionage campaigns by a wide margin (making up 86 percent of all breaches), but also increasing over the past year, they said.
Read more: https://threatpost.com/verizon-data-brea...ps/155843/
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