Report reveals cybercrime security threat trends from 2016

According to 2017 Trustwave Global Security Report, North America and retail lead in data breaches. Similar to previous years, 49% of data breaches were in North America, while 21% were in Asia-Pacific, 20% in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and 10% in Latin America. The largest single share of incidents involved the retail industry, at 22%, followed closely by the food and beverage industry, at nearly 20%.

Environments most breached in 2016 again consisted of corporate and internal networks, at 43%. Incidents affectingPOS systems increased to 31% in 2016, from 22% in 2015, while incidents affecting ecommerce environments fell to 26% from 38%. Incidents involving POS environments were most common in North America, which has been slower than much of the world to adopt the EMV payment card standard.

More than half of the incidents investigated targeted payment card data. Card track data, at 33% of incidents, primarily came from POS environments. Card-not-present (CNP) data, at 30%, mostly came from ecommerce transactions. Financial credentials, including account names and passwords for banks and other financial institutions, accounted for 18% of incidents, followed by other targets.

The report is based on data from hundreds of breach investigations Trustwave conducted in 2016 across 21 countries. This data was added to billions of security and compliance events logged each day across the network of Trustwave Advanced Security Operations Centers.