7Safe's Real-world study of security breaches

David Heath
Friday, 12 February 2010 14:21

Business IT - Security

Based on 62 intrusion investigations undertaken by the company, 7Safe describes a number of common themes in their report.

In a recent report 7Safe, a leading UK data security organization has summarized the results of "62 genuine cases of breaches investigated over a period of 18 months. These investigations have been conducted by the digital forensics team at 7Safe."

Although an extensive analysis of the breach investigations is provided, some of the summary data is especially informative.  For instance, 60% of the investigated incidents were shown to be some kind of SQL Injection attack.

36% of all attacks originated from Vietnam (the report notes that at the time, Vietnamese law was such that citizens could not be prosecuted for computer crimes against foreign countries).  Of the remainder, the US accounted for 29% and the UK for 13% of the attacks.

The next parameter may relate more to the kinds of breaches that 7Safe become involved in, but the report observes that 85% of cases relate Payment Card information, with around half of the remainder being "sensitive company data." 

34% of breaches potentially exposed between 10,000 and 50,000 cardholders, with one breach exposing over half a million cardholders.

Giving lie to the old adage that the biggest threat is internal, the survey reports that 80% of breaches occurred from outside the organization, with most of the remainder being related to business partners.

Lack of PCI compliance is shown to be a big problem.