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Global cybersecurity report brings good news, bad news

June 22, 2017

Cybersecurity provider Trustwave has released its 2017 Trustwave Global Security Report, a look at 2016 trends in cybercrime, data breaches and security threats.

The report offers good news in that intrusion detection and breach containment times improved over the previous year. However, it also includes bad news — for instance, the fact that threats such as malicious spam have increased.

Highlights from the 2017 Trustwave Global Security Report include:

• in 2016, 49 percent of data breaches investigated by Trustwave occurred in North America; 21 percent in Asia-Pacific; 20 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and 10 percent in Latin America. The largest share of incidents involved retail, at 22 percent, followed by food and beverage, at nearly 20 percent;
• most-breached environments were corporate and internal networks, at 43 percent. Year-over-year, POS incidents increased from 22 percent to 31 percent; e-commerce incidents fell from 38 percent to 26 percent;
• The median number of days from intrusion to detection dropped from 80.5 in 2015 to 49 in 2016;
• the median number of days from an intrusion to containment of a compromise stayed relatively the same at 62 days in 2016 compared with 63 days in 2015;
• more than half of incidents investigated targeted payment card data; 33 percent of incidents occurring in POS environments. Card-not-present data, at 30 percent of incidents, mostly came from e-commerce transactions. Financial credentials, including account names and passwords for banks and other financial institutions, accounted for 18 percent of incidents;
• 83 percent of malware samples examined tried to hide themselves through obfuscation; 36 percent used encryption;
• database vendors patched 170 vulnerabilities in the most common database products in 2016, up from 139 in 2015; and
• 99.7 percent of web applications tested included at least one vulnerability; the mean number was 11.

"As our data breach investigations and threat intelligence show, attackers continue to evolve their tactics and focus on extreme paydays as cybercrime becomes more like genuine businesses," Trustwave CEO and President Robert J. McCullen said in the release. "Meanwhile security skills and talent remain scarce. As an industry, we must continue to focus on key areas like threat detection and response, security scanning and testing and cloud security services that provide meaningful layers of protection from constantly evolving threats."

Download a free copy of the 2017 Trustwave Global Security Report. 

Trustwave gathered 2016 data from hundreds of its breach investigations in 21 countries, as well as billions of security and compliance events logged daily; tens of millions of network vulnerability scans; thousands of web application security scans; tens of millions of web transactions; tens of billions of email messages; millions of malicious websites, penetration tests and other security research.