January 26, 2017 – Cyber Law Watch

Juniper report predicts IoT botnets will be an unmanageable cyber-security issue

Jan 26 2017

Juniper’s Internet of Things for Security Providers: Opportunities, Strategies, & Market Leaders 2016-2021 cautions that the scale of connectivity related to consumer IoT will lead to unmanageable cybersecurity risk created by botnets in excess of 1 million units. The research found that botnets that disrupt internet services form part of the near-term threat landscape and will be used for more malicious purposes in the future. Botnets are expected to be used not only to disrupt services, but also to create a distraction in order to enable multi-pronged attacks. While the research calls on IoT manufacturers to implement security-by-design, it also found the market is wide open for challenger security vendors.

U.S. data breaches reached record high in 2016: Report

Jan 26 2017

By Cameron Abbott

According to a report highlighting findings from the Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout:

Data breaches in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 2016, with the number of breaches tracked reaching 1,093, a 40% increase from the year earlier
The financial services industry accounted for only 52 of the breaches, or 4.8%, making it the least hit of the five industries tracked. Business, healthcare, education and the government and military were hacked more than the financial services industry
For the eighth consecutive year, hacking, skimming and phishing were the main drivers of data breaches, representing 55.5% of all reported incidents. Many were due to CEO phishing in which sensitive data is exposed
While consumers and businesses are constantly warned to pay close attention to their email, breaches that used email and the internet as a way to hack people only accounted for 9.2% of all the hacks, while employee error was responsible for 8.7% of the hacks.

This isn’t the first data set to show that data breaches surged in 2016. According to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index, in the first six months of 2016, data breaches rose 15%, and the number of compromised data records jumped 31% compared to the previous six months. The findings also revealed that 64% of all data breaches involve identity and personal data theft.

Archive:January 26, 2017