Not sure if you all realized that the “reported” number of data breaches have increased tremendously over the past few years. HACKERS WANT YOUR INFORMATION! I think the average consumer is pretty good about protecting their identity and personal information, however, 99% of the breaches occur because your information is setting on some unsecured server at a company that provides you with services and products. Federal and state regulations have gotten stronger, however, what is the point of creating more regulations if you don’t have a SERIOUS process for ensuring these corporations will comply with them on a consistent basis.
Trustwave, an information security consulting company (…one of the leaders in the PCI DSS compliance arena) has produced a 2012 Global Security report, which can be found at: https://www.trustwave.com/global-security-report
This report is pretty detailed and an eye opener, but here are some of the highlights that are important to note.
Key Findings
- For the second year, the food & beverage industry made up the highest percentage of investigations at nearly 44%.
- Industries with franchise models are the new cyber targets: more than a third of 2011 investigations occurred in a franchise business.
- Data harvesting techniques continued to target data “in-transit” within victim environments as was seen in 62.5% of 2011 investigations.
- The most common password used by global businesses is “Password1” because it satisfies the default Microsoft Active Directory complexity setting.
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