It’s that time of the year when Verizon updates us on the latest trends in the global threat landscape with its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). The findings in this year’s report are based on data provided by more than 70 sources (including Qualys) about more than 41,000 security incidents, including more than 2,000 confirmed data breaches, across a variety of geographies (over 80 countries) and industries. A privileged observation point indeed.

While the very informative 78-page report touches on a wide range of areas,  I’ll focus on three that are particularly relevant for Qualys customers:

• Who are hackers’ preferred targets, and why
• The importance of reducing both the time it takes to discover security problems, such as vulnerabilities or breaches, and the time it takes to fix them
• How lack of visibility, human error and careless misconfigurations heighten organizations’ security risks

Read on to learn more about the evolution (or is it “EVILution”) of the threat landscape in the past year, and find out about recommended actions.

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This week Verizon released the 2013 edition of the Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). The DBIR has been adding data sources over the last five years, and this year’s report contains 641 confirmed breach incidents collected from 19 participating partners. The data allows Verizon to draw important conclusions as to the most common threats in the wild.

For me personally, the most important findings from the DBIR this year are:

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