Trustwave just released their latest breach (and penetration testing) report, and it’s chock full of metrics goodness. Like the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, it’s a summary of information based on their responses to real breaches, with a second section on results from their penetration tests.

The breach section is the best part, and I already wrote about one lesson in a quick post on DLP. Here are a few more nuggets that stood out:

It took an average of 156 days to detect a breach, and only 9% of victims detected the breach on their own – the rest were discovered by outside groups, including law enforcement and a credit card companies.
Chip and PIN was called out for being more resilient against certain kinds of attacks, based on global analysis of breaches. Too bad we won’t get it here in the US anytime soon.
One of the biggest sources of breaches was remote access applications for point of sale systems. Usually these are in place for third party support/management, and configured poorly.
Memory parsing (scanning memory to pull sensitive information as it’s written to RAM) was a very common attack technique. I find this interesting, since certain versions of memory parsing attacks have virtualization implications… and thus cloud implications. This is something to keep an eye on, and an area I’m researching more.
As I mentioned in the post 5 minutes ago, encryption was only used once for exfiltration.
Now some suggestions to the SpiderLabs guys:

I realize it isn’t politically popular, but it would totally rock if you, Verizon, and other response teams started using a standard base of metrics. You can always add your own stuff on top, but that would really help us perform external analysis across a wider base of data points. If you’re interested, we’d totally be up for playing neutral third party and coordinating and publishing a recommended metrics base.
The pen testing section would be a lot more interesting if you released the metrics, as opposed to a “top 10” list of issues found. We don’t know if number 1 was 10x more common than issue 10, or 100x more common.
It’s great that we now have another data source, and I consider all these reports mandatory reading, and far more interesting than surveys.

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