Microsoft Office Documents Are the Favorite Targets in Data Breaches

[Karamjit]

21% of all data breaches are simple accidents

Security studies are being released on a daily basis, and there's an industry trend that's been focused on raising the awareness towards data breaches.

One of the latest reports comes from Intel Security, and provides data gathered from 1,155 organizations around the world, all relating to data breaches, today's current security hot topic.

According to Intel, most data breaches occur because of external factors in 57% of the cases. When an internal factor is to blame, 21% of the breaches occur because of an accident, while 22% are intentional.

Attackers prefer customer and employee information above credit card details

In most of the data breaches attackers are targeting customer and employee information, with less focus put on intellectual property and financial information.

In the majority of cases, both internal and external actors, are targeting Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) above everything else, followed by CSV and plain text files (usually database dumps), PDFs, audio and video multimedia files, and XML data.

The funny thing is that while most of us think of a complicated cyber-espionage and hacker attacks when we say data breach, the Intel report confirms that in 40% of the cases, the data is stolen along with the actual, physical device.

Lost or stolen laptops are one of the main reasons for data breaches

The favorite targets are laptops, tablets, and USB drives, followed by smartphones, printed documents, CDs/DVDs, microphones, webcams, and faxes.

In the case the hackers decide to use digital avenues to hack into your company's network, they usually prefer Web protocols (like HTTP), followed by FTP, email, P2P, SSH, and VPN.

The Intel Grand Theft Data report also covered cloud infrastructures, seen in more companies with each new year. According to their surveys, one in three data breaches were recorded on a cloud server.

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