Cybercriminals Now Targeting Unemployment Benefit Claims

… have data be in plain text anywhere, Das said.

“This is powerful since it makes data useless even when lost,” he said.

Cybersecurity providers can also implement multi-party key ownership and access on a transactional basis. And they can implement automated data access and anomaly detection at the data level.

Breaches Drop, but Leaked Data Soars in 2020

More than 1,100 data breaches and exposures impacted more than 300 million Americans in 2020.

That’s according to Atlas VPN. Cybercriminals took advantage of the worldwide uncertainty created by the pandemic for a quick gain.

However, the number of events actually went down by nearly one-fifth, from 1,362 in 2019 to 1,108 in 2020. The number of affected individuals also dropped by 66%. It fell from more than 887 million in 2019 to more than 300 million in 2020.

Rachel Welch is COO of Atlas VPN.

Atlas VPN’s Rachel Welch

“While data breaches and exposures declined in 2020, other research sources reveal that the number of actual data records leaked reached record-highs last year,” she said. “Cyberattacks are growing more sophisticated as cybercriminals find new and more effective ways to exploit organizations and consumers.”

Cyberattacks were the primary reasons behind such data infringements. They made up 79% of all the root causes and hit close to 170 million individuals. Phishing, including smishing and business email compromise, was by far the most common cyberattack method behind 44% of such breaches.

Other reasons behind data breaches and leaks last year included human and system errors, at 14%, as well as physical attacks, at 7%.

While data breaches and exposures declined in 2020, they still caused massive damage. That’s because cybercriminals managed to get ahold of a wide array of sensitive personal information.

The most commonly leaked personally identifiable information type was a name. Up next was SSN.

Cybercriminals Upping Their Game with Bots, Automation

Cybercriminals increasingly are turning to bots and automation to make their attacks more efficient and effective, and to help them avoid detection.

In December, Barracuda researchers analyzed a sample of two months of data on web application attacks blocked by Barracuda systems and found a massive number of automated attacks. The top five attacks were dominated by attacks performed using automated tools.

Some of the key data points covered in the report include:

• Nearly 20% of attacks detected were fuzzing attacks. That’s where cybercriminals use automation to find the points at which applications break to exploit.
• About 12% of attacks were injection attacks. And most of the attackers were using automated tools like sqlmap to try to get into the applications. Many of these attacks were script kiddie-level noise. Those are attacks thrown at an application without reconnaissance to customize the attacks.
• Bots pretending to be a Google bot or similar were a close third. Those accounted for just over 12% of the web application attacks analyzed.
• Application distributed denial of service (DDoS) was surprisingly prevalent. This made up more than 9% of the sample Barracuda researchers analyzed. Cybercriminals are executing this across all geographies. A small portion of attacks come from bots blocked by site administrators.

Tushar Richabadas is Barracuda‘s senior product marketing manager for application and cloud security.

Barracuda’s Tushar Richabada

“If you look at some of the big attack campaigns in the past, like the ones against Drupal that were dubbed ‘Drupalgeddon,’ you see hundreds and thousands of sites being hacked using automated tools,” he said. “The reasons for the attacks succeeding are typically lack of updating the website software … and lack of protection in place before the website, such as a web application firewall (WAF).”

Once a hack happens, bad actors can deface the site or use it for any kind of attack, Richabadas said. For instance, the servers can be used as …