There has been a wave of security breach incidents according to the security-compliance firm Trustwave. The firm composed a comprehensive report detailing that there has been a 54% increase in the number of investigations over a one year time frame. E-commerce assets accounted for more than half of the targeted systems.
This report came just days prior to the hack of eBay which put millions of account holders’ personal information at risk. eBay claims that no payment details were compromised but 145 million records containing personal information including addresses, email addresses, and encrypted passwords were stolen. Target was also famously a victim of a hack, which did put consumer payment data at risk. Forty million credit card numbers and seventy million addresses, phone numbers, and other pieces of personal information were stolen from the company.
From the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL encryption discovered in April, to the Target breach late 2013, hackers are stepping up their efforts and taking advantage of any weakness that they see.
For the report, Trustwave surveyed nearly 700 breach investigations from 2013. Not only has there been a rise simply in the number of investigations, the report also revealed that the attacks seem to target many companies based in the United States. Fifty nine percent of breach targets were in the United States, fourteen percent in the United Kingdom and eleven percent on Australia. The data also revealed that one third of the companies that were breached were retailers.
Trustwave implored companies to step up their protection of their systems suggesting that retailers need to not only develop and institute a response plan, but also rehearse what steps should be taken if an incident occurs. Many retailers, have precautions in place, as did Target, but the response to a breach can determine the outcome of these type of situation as evidenced in recent events.
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