Information
NAICS 51

Last year, not unlike your boss at your last performance review, we highlighted the Errors in the Information industry. However, as we can see in Figure 88, there has been clear progress that we can put on the mid-year review. Errors have experienced a decline since their upswing half a decade ago in 2017.

To maintain the balance however, malware has seen a measurable increase over the last two years. That is reflected in Figure bbf55dbd. System Intrusion has jumped to the top in this vertical, even rising above Basic Web Application Attacks.

One interesting effect of having System Intrusion in the number one position is that the Information industry contains a smorgasbord of Action varieties. Use of stolen creds is the most common, but after that, a legion of varieties are present, with Ransomware, Misconfiguration, Backdoor or C2, and Export Data appearing in more than 4% of breaches. In fact, Information is tied for 2nd place in industries by the number of varieties above 4% at 17 different action varieties.

Figure 90 illustrates the top incidents, dominated by DDoS attacks and System Intrusions (which are driven by Ransomware). Please be sure not to forget about DDoS–while it is relatively easy to mitigate, it has certainly not gone away. 

Finally, Figure 91 provides a look into something else that’s easy to forget: botnets. The information industry takes the top spot in botnets for the second year running. Botnet breaches are often masked at the victim organization because they only see the malicious login, and not that the bot also stole the credentials.