In Verizon’s just-released 2023 Information Breach Investigations Report, cash is king, and denial of service and social engineering nonetheless maintain sway.

Verizon’s just-released 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report exhibits the continued effectiveness of enterprise e mail compromises. The research, which tracked incidents occurring between November 1, 2021 and October 31, 2022, discovered that BEC assaults doubled and represented greater than 50% of social engineering assaults. The worldwide research included incidents within the Asia-Pacific areas, EMEA, North America, and Latin America.
BECs have advanced to incorporate a number of subtle gambits, together with one lately reported by Avanan, a unit of Examine Level Software program, involving the usage of official providers, like Dropbox, to cover malware.
The research supplied a broad take a look at actors, actions, developments and incidents throughout industries, noting that public administration (3,270 incidents), data (2,105), finance (1,829) and manufacturing (1,814) are the sectors that skilled the very best numbers of incidents over the interval.
The report supplied these main findings:
- 74% of all breaches included the human factor, with folks being concerned both by way of error, privilege misuse, use of stolen credentials or social engineering.
- 83% of breaches concerned exterior actors, and the first motivation for assaults continues to be overwhelmingly financially pushed (95%).
- The three main methods wherein attackers entry a company are stolen credentials, phishing and exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Soar to:
Social engineering pretexts trick customers into dropping credentials
Constructed upon evaluation of 953,894 incidents, of which 254,968 are confirmed breaches, the Verizon research discovered that fifty% of all social engineering incidents throughout the research interval used pretexting, a phishing tactic that entails tricking somebody into giving up data which will lead to a breach. In response to the research, the follow, which is often utilized in BEC assaults, doubled in quantity in comparison with the prior yr’s.
Verizon reported 1,700 social engineering incidents general, with attackers most frequently utilizing it to steal credentials (Determine A).
Determine A

SEE: Half of firms tracked in a brand new research had been hit by spearphishing campaigns (TechRepublic)
Monetary achieve trumps politics in exploits
An uptick in espionage and state-aligned actors however, the Verizon research reported that monetary motives had been behind 94.6% of breaches, with organized crime being probably the most prevalent risk actor.
The authors of the research additionally reported a fourfold improve this yr within the variety of breaches involving cryptocurrency in comparison with the prior yr’s recorded breaches. “That may be a far cry from the times of innocence in 2020 and earlier, after we obtained one or two instances most every year,” they wrote.
Verizon reported the chances of financially motivated assaults by class:
- System intrusions: 97%, with solely 3% aimed toward espionage.
- Social engineering exploits: 89%, with 11% aimed toward espionage.
- Fundamental net utility assaults: 95%, with 4% aimed toward espionage.
- Misplaced and stolen belongings: 100% monetary achieve.
DDoS tops the listing of assault patterns
Verizon reported 6,248 distributed denial of service incidents. The research’s authors famous the brute pressure DDoS tactic referred to as DNS water torture reportedly grew in prevalence (Determine B).
Determine B

“Some extent of consideration that a few of our companions dropped at us was the expansion of distributed DNS Water Torture assaults in, you guessed it, shared DNS infrastructure,” the research authors wrote, noting the assaults are a useful resource exhaustion assault finished by querying random title prefixes on the DNS cache server so it at all times misses and forwards it to the authoritative server.
In response to the research, there have been 3,966 system intrusion incidents involving assaults utilizing malware to breach organizations, which frequently resulted within the supply of ransomware. In 34% of instances, information compromised was private in nature, adopted by system information, and eventually inner information.
SEE: Net customers should not very conscious of their information footprints. (TechRepublic)
Use of stolen credentials drives net utility assaults
About one quarter of Verizon’s dataset for its research concerned primary net utility assaults, 86% of them utilizing stolen credentials, which attackers make use of to realize entry to enterprises. The research reported 1,404 such incidents over its interval of remark, with 86% aimed toward credential theft, 72% for private information and 41% searching for inner information.
Verizon additionally recorded 602 miscellaneous errors that embody misconfigurations usually dedicated by system directors and builders. The research reported that 99% of those errors had been inner, with 89% of compromises involving private information.
Insiders, sure, however principally exterior actors
Attackers on the skin had been answerable for 83% of breaches, whereas inner actors (intentionally or inadvertently) accounted for 19% of breaches, based on Verizon. The report’s authors stated 62% of all incidents had been dedicated by organized crime.
Stolen credentials: The commonest motion
Almost half of breaches within the research interval concerned theft of credentials, with supply of ransomware being the central motion in simply over 20% of breaches. Phishing was the motion attackers took in 12% of exterior assaults, adopted by breaches, wherein the actions attackers targeted on had been:
- Pretexting
- Exploiting vulnerabilities
- Creating misdeliveries
- Abusing privilege
- Putting in a backdoor
- Exfiltrating information
- Scanning networks
Attacked belongings led by net servers
The overwhelming majority of assaults tracked by Verizon (83%) affected servers. Solely 20% of assaults affected folks instantly. A decreasingly small proportion of assaults impacted media, kiosks and terminals, networks and embedded methods.