37% Breaches affect Financial Groups: Verizon Report

The "Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report" has revealed that large-scale financial cybercrime and state-affiliated espionage dominated the security landscape in 2012.

Financially motivated cybercrime (75 per cent) has taken the top spot with state-affiliated espionage campaigns at No. 2 spot (20 per cent) which include cyber threats aimed at stealing intellectual property - such as classified information, trade secrets and technical resources - to further national and economic interests in data breaches report.
 
The 2013 DBIR also found that the proportion of incidents involving hacktivists held steady, but the amount of data stolen decreased, as many hacktivists shifted to other methods such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.  
 
David Small, Chief Platform Officer, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said,  "With more than a three-fold increase in data contributors this year, the '2013 Data Breach Investigations Report' offers what we believe is the most comprehensive look ever into the state of Cybersecurity. As always, our goal in producing the report is to increase the awareness of global cybercrime in an effort to improve the security industry’s ability to fight it, while helping government agencies and private sector organizations develop their own tailored security plans."
 
Other key findings in the Data Breach Report show that thirty-seven per cent of breaches affected financial organizations and 24 per cent affected retailers and restaurants. Twenty per cent of network intrusions involved the manufacturing, transportation and utilities industries, with the same percentage affecting information and professional services firms.  Of all cyberattacks, 38 per cent impacted larger organizations and represented 27 different countries.