C-Suite Under Attack as Money and Data Drive Breaches

State-sponsored attacks, cloud storage misconfiguration, ransomware and social threats targeting the C-suite all posed major risks to global organizations over the past 12 months, according to Verizon. The vendor’s newly released Data Breach Investigations Report 2019 comprises analysis of over 40,000 security incidents and more than 2000 reported data breaches across 180 countries, including FBI data new to this year’s study. It found that the vast majority (71%) of breaches are still financially motivated, although espionage accounted for a quarter (25%). Many of the latter cases will be down to nation state attacks (23%). Senior executives were highlighted as a particular security risk in this year’s report, as 12-times more likely to be the victim of a “social incident” and nine-times more likely to be targeted by a social breach than in previous years. According to Verizon, an incident is “any compromise of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of an information asset, while a breach is “an incident that results in the confirmed disclosure of data to an unauthorized party.