IBM - Number of Cyber Attacks on Retailers Dropped in 2014

ZDNet.com published news on 5th January, 2015 stating that security researchers of IBM recently released a report suggesting that overall cyber attacks against retailers are declining even though the total amount of data compromised continuously rising.

The number of retail cyber attacks has dropped by 50% since 2012 as per the findings of the report suggest. However, even with such significant decrease, hackers still have managed to steal more than 61 million records from retailers which are approximately 43% more since 2013 and that too without including Target and Home Depot online retailer breaches, which rocked the world of cyber crime in 2014.

While there has been a surge in Point of Sale (POS) malware attacks, the vast majority of episodes targeting the retail sector concerned SQL injection or Command Injection. The sophistication of SQL deployments and the lack of data validation carried out by security administrators made retail databases a principal target and this Command Injection technique was employed in almost 6,000 assaults against retailers. Complimentary methods include Shellshock and also POS malware like Dexter, BlackPOS, Alina, vSkimmer and Citadel.

Darkreading.com published a report on 5th January, 2015 quoting a comment of Chris Strand, CTO of Bit9, as "Last year we have seen many breaches of big high-status names. This (past) year, we have witnessed a decline in number of breaches during holiday season but a boost in number of records."

Darkreading.com published news on 5th January, 2015 quoting Arthur Tisi, a noted Retail Security Expert, as saying "The bottom line is that the threat to retailers is still extremely real. In fact, there were fewer instances of attacks but these are more vivid."

John Kuhn, Senior Threat Researcher for IBM Managed Security Services expects cyber crooks to continue hacking of large retailers but small ones will be more at threat as the big ones shore up security. Darkreading.com published a report on 5th January, 2015 stating that the guys breaching minor retailers will maintain what they are doing because it is effective and as more defenses come into action, they will be more cunning against large retailers."

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