New Report Details Widespread Security Threats

Consumers may feel confident in the security of their day-to-day electronic transactions, but that sense of security may be an illusion—especially if they live in North America, according to the “2018 Trustwave Global Security Report.”

Providing an in-depth look at top security threats, the report reviews breaches by industry and cybercrime trends from 2017. Researchers investigated data breaches affecting thousands of locations across 21 countries and found that North America suffers significantly more breaches than other regions, accounting for 43 percent of those studied by Trustwave. This rate was followed by the Asia Pacific region at 30 percent; Europe, Middle East, and Africa at 23 percent; and Latin America at 4 percent. The most affected industries were retail (17 percent), finance and insurance (13 percent), and hospitality (12 percent).

So, why is North America leading in data breaches? Trustwave posits that incidents involving point-of-sale systems were most common in North America because it has been slower to adopt the EMV chip standard for payment cards.

In all regions, payment card data is still the most lucrative target, accounting for 40 percent of data breaches, split between magnetic strip data at 22 percent and card-not-present at 18 percent. Fraudulent ATM transaction breaches are also on the rise, enabled by compromised account management systems at financial institutions.

While the report also reveals several alarming trends, including increased attack sophistication and malware obfuscation, vulnerabilities among 100 percent of web applications tested, more aggressive social engineering tactics, and more targeted web attacks, it did show improvement in areas such as intrusion detection and a decrease in spam messages containing malware.