A new trend, not specifically mentioned in the report, is large caches of stolen information being discovered that no one knew about before. Yesterday, Dark Reading announced that SecureWorks found one of these caches. Finjan has recently reported finding pretty much the same thing located on what they refer to as "crimeservers" on the Internet. The announcement by SecureWorks reported that hackers are using a trojan, called "Coreflood" also known as "AFCore."
SecureWorks reported that this trojan has gone undetected for a number of years and has compromised corporations, government agencies, healthcare agencies and "others." In this attack, one work station would be compromised and the hacker would wait for an administrator to log on. Once the administrator logged on to the infected work station, the hacker would then use the administrator's privileges to infect entire systems. This "hack" is being used to grab user names, passwords and even entire pages of information. Please note (my speculation) that this type of exploit is probably being used to steal more than financial information, also.
Given the fact that SecureWorks mentions government sites being hacked in this manner, there is no telling what the intent might be or who the information is being sold to (my speculation).
To the best of my knowledge, neither SecureWorks or Finjan have disclosed exactly who has been compromised or the exact details of the information to the general public.
This should lead the average person to believe that the problem of data breaches is far greater than anyone knows. The ITRC study explains why this is a problem when compiling any study on this subject.
Besides the ITRC, there are a lot of dedicated people gathering statistical information on data breaches. While they can only track information on the known occurrences, these people do a lot to educate the rest of us and raise the awareness level of what is becoming a growing problem.
The report gives credit to PogoWasRight, Attrition.org, breachblog.com, the Maryland and New Hampshire Attorney General breach notification lists and other sources that were used to compile this report.
The ITRC is a non profit organization designed to help businesses and people protect themselves from this clear and present danger to all of us. If you are interested in this problem, their site is a good place to educate yourself.
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