Verizon just released its 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, the 16th edition of this widely anticipated report catalogs and analyzes the past year’s trends in cyber crime. The report provides deep insight exploring the most common, most dangerous, and fastest-growing attack trends wielded against organizations worldwide. One of the most important findings is that the median cost per ransomware incident more than doubled over the past two years.

Additionally, after anonymizing, aggregating, and analyzing more than 16,000 security incidents and roughly 5,200 breaches for this year’s report, some of the high-level findings include:

• Seventy-four percent of breaches were caused by the human element through error, privilege misuse, use of stolen credentials, or social engineering.
• Fifty percent of all social engineering incidents in 2022 used pretexting—an invented scenario that tricks someone into giving up information or committing an act that may result in a breach. Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks (which are in essence pretexting attacks) have almost doubled across Verizon’s entire incident dataset.
• Most threats came from outside the organization, with 83 percent of breaches involving external actors, primarily from organized crime groups with financial motives. However, insider threats were still responsible for 19 percent of breaches.
• External actors leveraged a variety of different techniques to gain initial access to an organization, such as using stolen credentials (49 percent), phishing (12 percent) and exploiting vulnerabilities (5 percent).
• Ransomware accounted for 24 percent of all breaches analyzed in the report.

Other poignant insights involve the risk posed by senior leadership. According to Chris Novak, managing director of cybersecurity consulting at Verizon Business, “Senior leadership represents a growing cybersecurity threat for many organizations.” Not only do they possess an organization’s most sensitive information, they are often among the least protected, as many organizations make security protocol exceptions for them. With the growth and increasing sophistication of social engineering, organizations must enhance the protection of their senior leadership now to avoid expensive system intrusions.”

Members are encouraged to review this seminal report and share the findings and insights within their organization to strengthen cybersecurity posture and ensure everyone is aware of potential threats and attack vectors. The DBIR makes a great resource for security awareness and education training topics, reminders, and refreshers. Access the full report at Verizon.