Increase in the exploitation of vulnerabilities

Threat actors are using various vulnerabilities to gain access to sensitive information from companies. Visa conducted an analysis of payment-related fraud and data breaches in 2023. The report revealed that the most significant ransomware attack in 2023 impacted approximately 2,620 organizations and 77.2 million individuals whose PII was exposed.

The ransomware group CL0P claimed responsibility for the attack on June 6, 2023, but researchers suspect that CL0P had been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-34362) as early as July 2021. Prior to that, on January 31, 2023, CL0P had deployed ransomware by exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2023-0669) in a different file transfer software, allowing them to access data from 130 organizations.

The affected file transfer service was a commonly used vendor among merchants in various sectors such as financial services, retail, education, healthcare, and others.

Furthermore, the report highlighted North America as the most impacted region in terms of ransomware and data breach incidents affecting the payments industry. North America experienced nearly three times more ransomware attacks compared to Europe, which had the second highest number of incidents according to Visa PFD ransomware incident tracking.

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