Cyber crime is a thriving industry, finds new study

Cyber criminals are becoming more organised and sophisticated, with attacks resulting in more devastating results, according to a new report.

The ‘2016 Trustwave Global Security Report’ looked at data breach and cyber crime incidents from last year and found concerning trends, particularly where hackers employ the more common exploits, malware-as-a-service, their primary attack methods, and with regards to the kind of data they are looking for.

As cyber crime is considered a profitable activity and therefore an attractive proposition for coders, it is now being viewed as a viable business.

The main reason why hackers can so easily access systems is poor application security. Some 97 per cent of applications tested by information security company Trustwave were open to a hack through one or more vulnerabilities, found the study. Further, 10 per cent of those apps were regarded as being high risk or critical.

The report does also feature more promising news, with intelligence manager from Trustwave, Karl Sigler, telling SCMagazine.com:

“The percentage of spam being sent has dropped yet again from 59.7 per cent in 2014 to 54.1 per cent in 2015 and we’re also seeing that organisations have gotten much better at detecting an attack. Self-detection of compromises increased from 19 per cent in 2014 to 41 per cent in 2015.”

However, vulnerabilities remain an issue and it is an area that organisations need to improve upon. Certainly, they need to create more cyber security jobs to ensure that they have personnel on board who are capable of identifying these weaknesses.