Verizon Business today announced the results of an investigation into 8,302 security incidents in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), including 6,005 confirmed breaches. It shows that almost half of breaches (49%) in EMEA are internal. According to Verizon, this indicates a high number of cases of abuse of privilege and other human errors.

Across EMEA, temporary errors, system intrusions and social engineering are the leading causes of cybersecurity incidents, collectively accounting for 87 percent of breaches. The most commonly compromised data types are personal (64%), internal (33%) and confidential (20%).

The human factor

Most breaches worldwide (68%) involve unintentional human activity, regardless of whether a third party is involved or not. This is where someone makes a mistake or falls victim to a social engineering attack.

Since last year, the use of vulnerabilities as the first point of entry has increased to 14 percent of all breaches worldwide. This increase was primarily driven by the scale and increasing frequency of zero-day exploits by ransomware actors. In particular, the MoveIT breach enabled the widespread exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability.

On average, it takes organizations 55 days to resolve half of critical vulnerabilities after patches are available.

Artificial intelligence

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has been less critical to large-scale vulnerability management, which may calm some concerns.

“Access to valuable assets through the use of artificial intelligence is a concern for the near future. The fundamental vulnerabilities have not yet been addressed, so threat actors have not drastically improved their approach. “They are also not yet focused on using AI to accelerate social engineering,” said Chris Novak, director of cybersecurity at Verizon Business.

The report concludes with some interesting facts:

• About 32% of all breaches involved some form of extortion, including ransomware.
• Over the last two years, about a quarter (between 24% and 25%) of financially motivated incidents involved fraud.
• Over the last decade, nearly a third (31%) of all breaches used stolen credentials.