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Trends in Security Information
The HSD Trendmonitor is designed to provide access to relevant content on various subjects in the safety and security domain, to identify relevant developments and to connect knowledge and organisations. The safety and security domain encompasses a vast number of subjects. Four relevant taxonomies (type of threat or opportunity, victim, source of threat and domain of application) have been constructed in order to visualize all of these subjects. The taxonomies and related category descriptions have been carefully composed according to other taxonomies, European and international standards and our own expertise.
In order to identify safety and security related trends, relevant reports and HSD news articles are continuously scanned, analysed and classified by hand according to the four taxonomies. This results in a wide array of observations, which we call ‘Trend Snippets’. Multiple Trend Snippets combined can provide insights into safety and security trends. The size of the circles shows the relative weight of the topic, the filters can be used to further select the most relevant content for you. If you have an addition, question or remark, drop us a line at info@securitydelta.nl.
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Financial motives are the most prominent motive for cyber-espionage breaches
Motives over time
For the 2014-2020 DBIR timeframe, annually, we see Financial motive underlying breaches between 67% and 86% of the time and Espionage motive as the driver between 10% and 26% of the time.
Given their nature (e.g., stealthy tactics, specific targeting), Espionage attacks can be difficult to detect and identify as an actual Espionage-related attack (given scant IoCs and other details).
Whereas Financial attacks—if not detected while occurring or soon thereafter—eventually become apparent when money goes missing. At that point, the Financial motive, if not already ascertained, can be determined.
Motives
Within the dataset that shows all breaches, for both the 2020 DBIR and 2014-2020 DBIR timeframes, we see Financial motive as the overwhelming Actor motive (86% and 76%, respectively), with Espionage the second highest motive (10% and 18% respectively).
Actor motives consolidated in “The Rest” (6%) for the 2014-2020 DBIR timeframe include Fun (3%), Grudge (1%), Convenience (1%) and Ideology (1%).