Hackers have more room to work with the progressive move towards mobile payments and the steady decline of brick-and-mortar stores in favor of ecommerce sites. This movement opens up opportunities to steal your information through tactics like formjacking and DDoS attacks that can be devastating for sites and dangerous for customers. One way to take a proactive approach against hackers is to dig into trends from previous breaches and see what patterns attackers seem to follow.
Varonis took a look at hacking trends across different industries to see who is most at risk and what data we need to prioritize the most when it comes to safety. Did you know that the finance and retail industries are among the top five most-breached industries? Another interesting point is that personal data (like social security numbers and birthdays) is the most compromised data type in the finance industry, not payment information (like credit card numbers). This indicates that those of us specifically in the finance sector should first reevaluate the security protocols surrounding our customer’s personal information since hackers will likely target that information first.
Another important thing to note is that hacking is not reserved for enterprise-level businesses regardless of what we may see in the news. In fact, 58 percent of 2017 breach victims were small businesses. Take a look at the visual below to see what other trends hackers seem to follow and discover what threats you should look out for in your own industry.
