Fresh FireEye research suggests that today's cyberattackers are becoming smarter about the systems they seek to break, and are commonly using impersonation and social engineering to tap into the most common weakness in the security chain -- employees.
Within FireEye's sixth annual
M-trends report, which tracks the threat landscape and emerging threat actors, the firm says that cybersecurity has now gone beyond the boardroom and has entered the mainstream thanks to the number of high-profile security breaches in 2014. While companies are taking less time to discover a data breach, hackers are smarter about the way they conduct themselves -- and a lack of basic security safeguards are leaving businesses vulnerable.
Over the past year, companies and organizations including US retailer
Target,
Sony,
Staples and
JPMorgan have been struck by separate cyberattacks leading to the loss of millions of customer and employee records -- including sensitive data, credit cards and personal information which could be used in identity theft.
