
And that means plentiful opportunities for those considering cybersecurity careers. Everyone is vulnerable, from consumers to corporations-even governments the world over. However, it’s not just consumers who are falling victim to hackers at an increasing rate.
#Equifax data breach analysis license
That personal information included Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, license plate numbers, credit card numbers and more.Īlthough the attacks at Yahoo! in recent years were much larger in scale with 1 billion consumers affected, the kind of personal information made vulnerable in the attack on Equifax makes this data breach much more frightening-at least in the eyes of the consumers (who are also concerned that the company waited six weeks before revealing the attack). From August 2017 through January 2018, hidden exfiltration tunnels disguised as unencrypted web traffic doubled from two per 10,000 devices to four in financial services.By now you’ve probably heard that the personal information of up to 143 million consumers was hacked when Equifax, one of the world’s largest credit reporting agencies, fell victim to a data breach. But in financial services, that number more than doubled to five.

For every 10,000 devices across all industries, 11 hidden exfiltration tunnels disguised as encrypted web traffic were detected.Vectra detected more than twice as many hidden data-exfiltration tunnels per 10,000 devices in financial services than all other industries combined.

Researchers detected significantly more hidden command-and-control tunnels per 10,000 devices in financial services than all other industries combined.“The same hidden tunnels enable attackers to sneak out of networks, undetected, with stolen data.” “What stands out the most is the presence of hidden tunnels, which attackers use to evade strong access controls, firewalls and intrusion detection systems,” Morales added. “Attackers will mimic and blend in with these behaviors, making them difficult to expose.” “Every industry has a profile of network and user behaviors that relate to specific business models, applications and users,” said Chris Morales, head of security analytics at Vectra. The analysis of this metadata provides a better understanding about attacker behaviors and trends as well as business risks, enabling Vectra customers to avoid catastrophic data breaches. After the breach occurred, it reportedly went undetected for 78 days.įrom August 2017 through January 2018, Vectra monitored network traffic and collected metadata from more than 4.5 million devices and workloads from customer cloud, data center and enterprise environments. The Equifax breach resulted in the theft of driver’s license numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information from 145.6 million consumers, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Researchers found the same type of attacker behaviors across the financial services industry as those that led to the 2017 Equifax data breach. But while financial services firms didn’t experience the same volume of breaches as other industries, they still face considerable risk as lucrative targets of cyberattackers in search of a windfall. Security breaches across multiple industries continue in an upward trajectory, and the financial services industry is no exception. These tunnels are used to remotely control an attack, known as command-and-control, and steal data, known as exfiltration, while remaining largely undetected. Vectra disclosed that cyberattackers build hidden tunnels to break into networks and steal information.

Many global financial services organizations are targeted by sophisticated cyberattackers in an attempt to steal critical data and personally-identifiable information (PII), according to Vectra.įinancial industry attacker behaviors per 10,000 devices
