A new report from IBM has found that despite a 50% decline in the number of cyber-attacks against US retailers in 2014, the number of records stolen from them remains at near-record highs.
Cyber-attack record thefts are at near-record highs
IBM Security researchers reported that in 2014, cyber attackers still managed to steal more than 61 million records from retailers despite the decline in attacks, demonstrating cyber criminals’ increasing sophistication and efficiency.
According to IBM, cyber attackers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, using new techniques to obtain massive amounts of confidential records with increased efficiency. Since 2012, the number of breaches reported by retailers dropped by 50%. Despite this decline, the perpetrators were able to impact a far greater number of victims with each incident.
In 2013, there were more than 20 breaches disclosed including several large breaches that caused the number of records compromised to rise drastically, reaching close to 4 million. Over the same period in 2014, 10 breaches were disclosed which resulted in just over 72,000 records getting compromised. This past year, the primary mode of attack was unauthorised access via Secure Shell Brute Force attacks, which surpassed malicious code, the top choice in 2012 and 2013.
Attackers secured more than 61 million records in 2014, down from almost 73 million in 2013. However, when the data was narrowed down to only incidents involving less than 10 million records (which excludes the top two attacks over this timeframe, Target Corporation and The Home Depot), the data shows a different story — the number of retail records compromised in 2014 increased by more than 43% over 2013.
While there has been a rise in the number of POS malware attacks, the vast majority of incidents targeting the retail sector involved Command Injection or SQL injection. The complexity of SQL deployments and the lack of data validation performed by security administrators made retail databases a primary target. Over 2014, this Command Injection method was used in nearly 6,000 attacks against retailers. Additional methods include Shellshock as well as POS malware such as BlackPOS, Dexter, vSkimmer, Alina and Citadel.
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