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Despite an 50 percent decline in the number of cyber attacks against U.S. retailers, the number of records stolen from them remains at near record highs, according to findings released today by IBM. IBM Security researchers report that in 2014, cyber attackers still managed to steal more than 61 million records from retailers despite the decline in attacks, demonstrating cyber criminal’s increasing sophistication and efficiency.
Contrary to what most would expect, the majority of cyber attackers scaled back their hacking efforts around Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2014 rather than capitalize from the massive spike in retail spending.
Cyber attackers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, using new techniques to obtain massive amounts of confidential records with increased efficiency, says the report. Since 2012, the number of breaches reported by retailers dropped by 50 percent. Despite this decline, the perpetrators were able to impact a far greater number of victims with each incident.
“The threat from organized cyber crime rings remains the largest security challenge for retailers,” said Kris Lovejoy, General Manager, IBM Security Services. “It is imperative that security leaders and CISOs in particular, use their growing influence to ensure they have the right people, processes and technology in place to take on these growing threats.”
Cyber attackers reduced their activity across all industries on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Despite this “cyber threat slow down,” the retail and wholesale industries emerged as the top industry target for attackers in 2014, a potential result of the wave of high profile incidents impacting name brand retailers. In the two years prior, manufacturing ranked first amongst the top five attacked industries while the retail and wholesale industry ranked last. This past year, the primary mode of attack was unauthorized access via Secure Shell Brute Force attacks, which surpassed malicious code, the top choice in 2012 and 2013.
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