According to Tenable's analysis of 1,825, breach data incidents publicized between November 2020 and October 2021, at least 40,417,167,937 records were exposed globally in 2021. This is risen from 730 publicly announced incidents with just over 22 billion data exposed over the same period in 2020.
Organizations can efficiently prioritize security operations to stop attack paths and protect key systems and assets by studying threat actor behavior. Many of the events investigated for this research can be easily mitigated by fixing legacy flaws and fixing misconfigurations, which can help limit attack routes.
In 2021, ransomware had a huge impact on businesses, accounting for about a 38% of all data breaches. and unsecured cloud databases were responsible for 6% of all breaches.
SSL VPNs that haven't been patched remain an ideal entry point for cyberespionage, exfiltrating sensitive and proprietary data, and encrypting networks.
Threat groups, particularly ransomware, have been progressively exploiting Active Directory flaws and misconfigurations.
When security controls and code audits are not in place, software libraries and network stacks that are frequently utilized among OT devices might create additional threats.
Cyberespionage operations used the software supply chain to acquire sensitive data, whereas ransomware groups preferred physical supply chain disruption as a technique to extract payment.
Data breaches wreaked havoc on the healthcare and education sectors the most.
Claire Tills, Senior Research Engineer, Tenable stated, “Migration to cloud platforms, reliance on managed service providers, software and infrastructure as a service have all changed how organizations must think about and secure the perimeter.”
“Modern security leaders and practitioners must think more holistically about the attack paths that exist within their networks and how they can efficiently disrupt them. By examining threat actor behaviour we can understand which attack paths are the most fruitful and leverage these insights to define an effective security strategy. ”
Fixing assets is difficult enough given the sheer frequency of vulnerabilities revealed, but in 2021 it became much harder due to partial patches, vendor miscommunications, and patch bypasses.
There were 21,957 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) reported in 2021, up 19.6% from 18,358 in 2020 and 241% more than the 6,447 declared in 2016. The number of CVEs increased at an average yearly percentage growth rate of 28.3 percent from 2016 to 2021.
