The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) for 2024 was recently released. It’s a must read of those in cybersecurity. It gives great insight into the overall threat landscape and then breaks it down by industry. Working in healthcare this is important because while ransomware grabs the news a bigger concern may actually be insider threat. This is highlighted even more this year with new requirements around reporting on security incidents and breaches insider threat and specifically the Miscellaneous Error category. My random thoughts from the report are below with a lean towards healthcare.

Insights and thoughts on the Verizon DBIR

Vulnerability exploitation on the rise

Exploitation of vulnerabilities tripled from last year. I’ve read similar numbers from other trend reports and it makes sense. As organizations get more controls in place such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and people get better at identifying phishing (later in the report) attackers will pivot to other ways of getting in. We’ve already seen a rash of vulnerabilities in network appliances over the last several months that could allow attackers into the network.

Human Element Calculation Change

Privilege misuse was removed from the human element calculation which means the human element metric dropped to 68% instead of 76% if it were kept in this year. I’m a little torn because I still believe it’s human element misusing privilege. The idea is to align their security awareness recommendation better. From that angle I get it because privilege misuse is more intentional regardless of security awareness training.

Added third-party vendor and supply chain issues

This is a good one to add. As organizations get better at defending attackers will look to get in via third-party vendor or supply chain issues. Which really isn’t a new concept see: Target breach or the Trojan War. A good third-party vendor risk management program is essentially to keeping organizational data secure.

Errors Increases due to mandatory breach notifications

Errors increased to 28% this year. Internal actors increased from 20% to 35%. Organizations that don’t have to report won’t. In healthcare if a breach is under 500 records then reporting doesn’t have to occur, so there’s even more Errors not being reported. I expect more regulation will make this number continue to grow for healthcare . This will hopefully highlight and shift focus to finding solutions to the insider threat problem. Yes, there’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) but it’s a pain in the ass to get in place.

Security Awareness is Improving

20% of people are reporting simulated phishing emails and 11% are reporting after clicking. That’s positive improvement. I also really like that the report focused on report rates and not clicking. Click rates can fluctuate depending on the difficulty of the phish and the time of year. Too much focus is put on clicking when what’s really needed is an improvement in reporting.

Reporting gives the security team an opportunity to respond to an incident sooner. I always tell people that clicking doesn’t bother me. Did they report it? It’s much easier to respond now, than several weeks later when there’s a bigger issue. Encouraging reporting, even when a click happens, also helps build a more positive security culture. We’re all human and make mistakes. I’ve fallen for my own phish before.

Generative AI Not as much of an issue as we thinK

It’s recognized that AI is helping attackers in writing phishing email and malware and being deployed in political campaigns but it’s not being used in way that is significantly contributing to breaches. This is why I love the Verizon DBIR. Despite the news headlines and play on social media AI and all the awful things it can do is not currently having a measurable impact. It’s certainly still something that needs to be discussed, understood, and controls put in place, but it may be better to focus on efforst that may make a more substantial impact such as vulnerability management and security awareness.

Distributed Denial of Service is the top action in incidents

This is where understanding the verbiage of the report is important. Incident vs breach. Breach is a loss of data. An incident is a security incident that may not involve data being stolen. Hence, DDoS isn’t about taking the data it’s about taking the service offline for an extended period of time. This shocked me a little. DDoS is still happening and it’s impacting a lot of organizations. Having mitigating controls and a plan in place to respond is important for any organization.

Jen Easterly comments on vulnerabilities and the need to shift focus

“...recurring classes of software defects to inspire the development community to improve their tools, technologies, and processes and attack software quality problems at the root.”

Quality code is secure code is something I’ve been preaching for years. If the quality is there then the security will be there. It’s in the documentation. When developers don’t follow best practices and the documentation that’s when vulnerabilities get created. The reason why security folks have a job is because people aren’t developing, coding, or configuring things right in the first place.

I like that Jen is taking a more broad view and it’s not something I’ve thought about. Instead of focusing on individual vulnerabilities or bugs we should go a level up. Every organization is different and every development team is going to have different issues with certain quality issues. We need to be looking at the class of bugs and trying to solve for the large grouping of vulnerabilities. This will help the development community identify where they can make improvements in their tools, technologies, and most importantly processes.

Social Engineering Section

BEC attacks had a median transaction of $50,000. They have a great graph that shows most organizations can get their money back by reaching out to law enforcement. I had a great conversation with Jayson E. Street recently on the Exploring Information Security podcast on social engineering and he had a great idea to send everyone involved in financial transactions a card with a code word on it. If that code word wasn’t authenticated then it’s very likely a BEC attack. I love the simplicity of the solution and I think it can make a good impact.

WEB APPLICATION ATTACKS SECTION

Credential stuff and brute force attacks are the most common against APIs. Authentication and authorization are the biggest issues for APIs, not so much injection vulnerabilities. This improves security but also means permissions should be top of mind when developing APIs. Things like MFA and rate limiting also need to be in place to help mitigate the potential of a breach. 1000 credentials are available online daily for $10. Credentials are cheap and easy to come by.

Free gaming currency lures lead malicious NPM packages was not something on my radar. This is the younger generation looking to make a fast bUck in the gaming landscape. Unfortunately, they’re downloading malware. Typo squatting was second. From the report it talked about packages checking external repositories before internal. It’s always better to try and build an internal repo system that pulls updates from the known good repositories. This is easier said than done.

Miscellaneous ERrors

This is often overlooked by organizations. Insider threat is the bigger concern in industries like healthcare where people are handling personal, health, and financial data. There’s a lot of data flying around. More than 50% was due to misdelivery which means people sent sensitive information to the wrong party and often non-malicious.

87% of users accounted for errors. System administrators go from 46% last year to 11% this year. System administrators largely accounted for internal threat issues due to misconfiguration. They’ve tightened up but it also highlights how under reported user errors were.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is huge to help prevent this. The problem is that DLP is a pain in the ass to implement. I hope that highlighting how big of an issue insider threat will encourage companies to try and tackle the problem in more creative ways.

Healthcare Industry

I’ve already talked a lot about healthcare above. Miscellaneous Errors regained the top spot after being second to system intrusions last year. I would expect system intrusions to continue to decline in next year’s report due to law enforcements increased involvement in taking down ransomware gangs. Privilege misues was second. This is the more malicious actions internal threat actors are taking. System intrusions were third.

Conclusion

The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is a must read. It provides critical insights into the evolving threat landscape, particularly emphasizing the increasing complexity of cybersecurity challenges across various industries. It’s a good anchor point for challenging assumptions about the biggest risk to our own organization.

As cybersecurity environments become increasingly complex, the DBIR’s insights are invaluable for professionals seeking to bolster their defenses and anticipate potential threats. The report serves not only as a tool for understanding but also as a catalyst for implementing robust security measures tailored to specific industry needs. For those in cybersecurity, especially in sectors as sensitive as healthcare, the DBIR is an essential resource that supports ongoing efforts to protect sensitive information and systems from both external and internal threats.