2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report: Key Stats

Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) revealed a troubling boom in vulnerability exploitation throughout 2023. Instances of vulnerabilities being exploited surged by over 3x (180%) from the previous year. It also uncovered a troubling increase in the use of ransomware and extortion techniques, which were involved in 32% of all breaches.

Verizon manages over 4,200 networks globally, processing 34 trillion raw log files per year. In total, the investigation report analyzed 30,458 security incidents and 10,626 confirmed breaches in 2023. This alone represents a two-fold increase over the year before.

While the sheer rise in cybersecurity incidents is alarming, the report also solidified our understanding of existing weaknesses. The human element continued to be the strongest common denominator in successful data breaches, playing a role in 68% of attacks.

In fact, roughly a quarter of financially motivated incidents in the last two years involved some form of pretexting. Pretexting is where cybercriminals use fabricated stories or scenarios to gain the trust of a victim in an attempt to trick them into handing over sensitive data, downloading malware, and more. It’s commonly used in social engineering tactics, such as spear phishing and whaling.

Over the last decade, the use of stolen account credentials also played a role in 31% of data breaches. Such credentials are gained by cybercriminals via the aforementioned pretexting or via past data breaches.

In terms of the type of threat actors involved, organized crime was by far the most prevalent, being involved in over 60% of cases. Perhaps most alarmingly, though, is that the involvement of end-users (employees or contractors) rose from 11% to 26% in the span of a year.

However, the good news is that Verizon found an improvement in how targets respond to potential phishing attempts in simulated tests. In 2023, 20% of users were able to identify potential phishing and report it before clicking on the email, while 11% of those that clicked the email also reported it.

Beside the human element, other high-instance attack vectors were errors (28%) and third-party software (15%, including software vulnerabilities).

Across all regions, personal or credential information was the leading type of compromised data. This is evidenced in numerous recent high-profile data breaches, such as the recent hack of UnitedHealth Group.