Compromised credentials still to blame for many data breaches

Compromised credentials are still the cause of almost a quarter of all data breaches, according to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

Data breaches, account hijacking and malicious insiders all rated as top threats. These attacks often occur because of a lack of scalable identity access management systems, failure to use multifactor authentication, insufficient password use and a lack of ongoing automated rotation of cryptographic keys, passwords and certificates.

It’s not surprising that insufficient identity, credential and access management are ranked as the top vulnerability in today’s released findings.

Key findings

• Of those who indicated their company reported a data breach, 22 percent of respondents noted the breach was due to compromised credentials. In addition, 65 percent of respondents indicated that the likelihood their company would experience a future breach due to compromised credentials was medium to high.
• Surprisingly, there were no significant differences in security solutions used between respondents who reported a breach and those who either did not report or did not know of a reported breach in their organizations.
• Companies embracing big data solutions consistently adopted more perimeter and identity security solutions.
• 76 percent of internal access control policies extended to outsourced IT, vendors and other third parties.

“The survey results are insightful into understanding insufficient identity, credential and access management, as it relates to the evolving, increasingly cloud-based enterprise,” said Luciano Santos, Executive VP of Research for the CSA. “We hope that organizations and cloud providers can use this information to help gain an understanding of how to protect themselves and their data beyond the perimeter, as they begin to adopt cloud environments.”