DBIR: Vulnerability Exploits Triple as Initial Access Point for Data Breaches

The exploitation of vulnerabilities as an initial access step for a breach increased by a staggering 180% between 2022 and 2023.

According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), published on May 1, this method of gaining unauthorized access leading to a breach accounted for 14% of malicious actors’ way into a network. It is the third most used after credential theft and phishing.

This growth is partly due to the exploitation of the MOVEit vulnerability and several other zero-day exploits that ransomware actors used throughout 2024, the report said.

“It is truly concerning. Even when considering only the US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency’s (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, it takes organizations around 55 days to remediate 50% of those critical vulnerabilities after their patches are available – a dangerous lag,” warned Verizon.

“On the flip side, the median time for detecting the first scan for a CISA KEV vulnerability is five days from publication in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database (not from the patch being available).”