iTWire - Billions of credentials, personal records stolen through data breaches:...

Friday, 10 March 2023 11:09

Billions of credentials, personal records stolen through data breaches: report Featured

Last year, 4,518 data breaches were reported globally with threat actors exposing or stealing 22.62 billion credentials and personal records, ranging from account and financial information to emails and Social Security numbers, a new security report has revealed.

According to the new State of Cyber Threat Intelligence report from risk intelligence firm Flashpoint a growing body of evidence demonstrates just how extensively cyber threats are overlapping, intersecting, and relating—“from the resilient nature of the illicit communities where cybercriminals operate to the to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) cyber threat actors use to execute their attacks”.

Flashpoint examines why these threats—from the online spaces in which cybercriminals operate to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they use to execute their attacks—are cyclical and what that means from an intelligence and security perspective.

“Consider the cycle of illicit communities, which is marked by the motions of takedowns (Raid Forums), resurrections (AlphaBay), and new venues (Libre) which may then be taken down,” according to the report’s intro.

“Call it a game of cat-and-mouse, of chicken-and-egg. To aim to understand where this cycle begins and ends, however, is to miss the point. Like other cycles in the threat landscape, the cycle of illicit markets should be viewed as a converged, self-serving mechanism whose continuity is fuelled by competition, evolving technology, communication preferences, law enforcement partnerships, know-how and other intangibles, and much more.

“And, like most modern organisations, threat actors employ multiple teams or individuals, with varying motivations and targets, as well as various tools to streamline the tasks that contribute to their main goal—the compromise of a victim’s systems.”

Acording to Flashpoint, organisations cannot afford to view, prepare for, mitigate, and prevent these threats in silos, “as though one threat (and the cycle it exists in) is separate from another”.

“Multiple disjointed feeds and solutions make identifying, prioritising, and mitigating persistent and evolving threats difficult and costly. Since threat vectors are converging, CISOs should aim to unify and rally their security and intelligence teams behind a single source of truth that integrates workflows between their Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), Fraud, Vulnerability Management (VM), and IT Security teams, as well as other functions,” Flashpoint says.

“It is through this lens that we examine the trends, data, analysis, strategies, and insights that will impact the ways in which security and intelligence teams tackle challenges in 2023,” Flashpoint concudes.

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