Payment Breaches Up In 2015

When it comes to data breaches, the ones involving payment-card systems will still top concerns for 2015, according to a new report from Experian.

Experian’s second annual Data Breach Industry Forecast predicts that with the looming deadline for U.S. retailers and card issuers to adopt EMV chip-and-PIN technology in October 2015, cyberthieves will shift into high gear to profit from attacks involving traditional mag-stripe cards, according to the Credit Union National Association.

Thieves will also keep looking for new vulnerabilities to target as their ability to capture card data moves away from soon-to-be-outdated point-of-sale devices.

Attackers are also expected to begin targeting cloud data in 2015, especially consumer online credentials, passwords and other personal data stored in the cloud. Health care breaches, which are already on the rise, will keep growing, especially in the wake of electronic health records and the growing popularity of wearables. And fresh breaches will surface via the Internet of Things, many of which have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth capabilities but are hard to update and often not security-hardened.

On the people side, business leaders will be under increased scrutiny — and more business leaders may be forced out in 2015 after major data breaches, while legal and regulatory actions are likely to increase. And employee mistakes will remain companies’ biggest threat, both because of human error and malicious insiders — together, they represented 59 percent of security incidents in the past year, Experian noted.