A new record has been set with regards to the data breach, ‘more than 22 billion records were revealed globally amid 730 publicly leaked data violations in 2020’, as stated in a report published on Friday. A major chunk of data breaches was linked to ransomware attacks which are nearly thirty-five percent.
Cyber exposure company Tenable’s Security Response Team (SRT) analyzed that 14 percent of data leaks were the outcome of email compromises in the period of January 2020 to October 2020. The main tactics used by threat actors was the dependency on unpatched susceptibilities in their strikes, meanwhile, encompassing multiple other vulnerabilities.
While giving insights, Satnam Narang, a Staff Research Engineer at Tenable stated “every day, cybersecurity professionals in India and the rest of the world are faced with new challenges and vulnerabilities that can put their organizations at risk. The 18,358 vulnerabilities disclosed in 2020 alone reflects a new normal and a clear sign that the job of a cyber defender is only getting more difficult as they navigate the ever-expanding attack surface”.
The growth rate of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) increased at an average of 36.6 percent from 2015 to 2020. In 2020 it shot up to 183 percent as compared to 2015; 18,358 CVES were reported in 2020 as compared to 6,487 in 2015.
“Pre-existing vulnerabilities in virtual private network (VPN) solutions - many of which were initially disclosed in 2019 or earlier – continue to remain a favorite target for cybercriminals,” Narang told.
Search engines such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer resulted in 35 percent of all zero-day susceptibilities abused in wild by the threat actors.
“In 2021, we must have the tools, awareness, and intelligence to effectively reduce and eliminate blind spots” Narang concluded.