One out of two cyber attacks saw breach of passwords: Wipro report

Number of records stolen across globe grew by 53.6% in 2016 as against 2015

Nearly One out of every two cyber attacks saw breach of password previous year indicates the chances of further damage across different enterprises, said the State of Cybersecurity Report, 2017 by IT services major Wipro.

The report, which was released on Thursday, said "56 per cent of breaches reported had passwords as the types of data stolen, implying that further damage could be perpetrated using the stolen data".

It has also found out that the number of records stolen across the globe grew by 53.6 per cent in 2016 as against 2015.

Wipro said in a statement said the report is a result of interviewing the chief information security officer (CISO) teams of 139 organisations across various sectors and 11 countries in North America, Europe, APAC, West Aisa and South Asia. It evaluated trends in current security practices and analysed thousands of attempted security attacks and incidents captured in Wipro's Cyber Defence Centres during 2016. Another level of research was conducted to understand the "impending disruptions in the cybersecurity domain".

Impact of cyber attacks or data thefts on certain enterprises was often aggravated by the reaction on social media.

"Data breaches once made public, resulted immediately in high peaking of negative sentiments on social media against the enterprise concerned, indicates the post facto Twitter sentiment analysis," noted the report.

The report mentioned that "majority of the security products were themselves vulnerable to exploitation" and CISOs would be required to keep track of vulnerabilities in the security products themselves.

"Cyber security is becoming a top priority for businesses. It has become very critical to identify risks near real-time and empower stakeholders to take actions and decisions based on priority," said Sheetal Mehta, Global Head, Cybersecurity & Risk Services, Wipro.