More specifically, are we seeing companies breached due to their (obvious?) security flaws, hackers getting better at what they do, or a combination of both?
What is the future of security for these large companies that we put our trust into that our data is safe?
Security is hard. Especially at the scale of those companies. Since they are big, they get a lot more hacking attempts. Makes more sense for bad actors to attack someone with millions of customers than your mom & pop store that might have hundreds, if everything being equal.
More and more people and compa ies wants to store things “in the cloud”, (read: someone else’s server). It is for the most part a good thing as it makes it easier to access, but it also opens up bigger and other attack vectors.
So, I think the number of breeches will only increase. Not always because the companies have bad security (though sometimes it is 100% that), but also because the attack vectors keep growing due to changed business decisions and user preferences.
Also, data governance is attrocious in most places. Some of the things I’ve seen ICT do with PII is mind-blowing. I’ve been a part of three large breaches (two ransomwware and one data theft/sale) and it’s always ironically been because of ICT managers.
I’ve caught a senior manager storing employee and device information for 17K staff in a Google Sheet on their personal account so they could distribute it to an external consultancy. I stumbled across the URL in an email chain, confirmed it was fully publicly accessible—anyone in the world could see it if they had the URL—and had been live for two months. This was apparently the safe workaround for emailing it as a file… They didn’t understand what was so wrong until I declared a formal breach internally. I can only assume that info got out but there was obviously no way of knowing. Names, addresses, genders, DOBs, etc. for employees. Then MAC addresses, IMEIs, network locations, serials, etc. for devices. Just sitting there…