Exploitation of vulnerabilities almost tripled as a source of data breaches last year

Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report observed a 180% jump in breaches that relied on exploited vulnerabilities, driven largely by the MOVEit zero-day campaign which generated roughly 1,567 breach notifications; the report links this activity to ransomware actors and significant impact on less mature sectors (notably education), while finding no material evidence of generative AI being used in attacks.