TECHNOLOGY
FBI IC3 report: cybercrime cases up 69%. By Scott Nursten, CEO, ITHQ
WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING INDUSTRY The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) reported 791,790 cybercrime cases in 2020 with direct losses of almost $4.2 billion. Many more cases are unreported or unknown - the Solarwinds breach compromised the entire supply chain and went undetected for months. The IC3 report aims to use data to catch cyber criminals and recover stolen funds. To some degree, it is working. But cybercrime is slippery; criminals hide behind foreign IP addresses and cloaking technologies. It’s also incredibly lucrative. With 69% growth, cybercrime is the fastest growing industry on the planet. Is your business prepared for the war that is coming?
CYBER DEFENCE SPEND VS CYBERCRIME PROFITS
Global cybersecurity spend was $153 billion in 2020 (Juniper research). Sound impressive? Cyber criminals took $2 trillion from their victims over the same period. IBM puts the average cost of a corporate breach at $3.86 million, yet businesses are not even investing 10% of this amount in cyber defences on average. The biggest single reported payout in the year was a wire fraud business email compromise costing $60 million. Another case cost $2 million and yet another cost $977,000. These three cases, each costing a million dollars plus, show the scale of loss is growing dramatically. The $4.2 billion losses do not include consequential costs such as lost time, lost earnings etc. This is the amount paid directly to criminals from American companies and individuals desperate to fix a problem they could have prevented for a fraction of that.
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GLOBAL SIGNIFICANCE
The IC3 report is the only one of its kind to categorise cybercrime, attack methods, direct losses and criminal patterns. It shows how crimes are escalating across the world, many with international links. Excluding the US, the UK leads the top 20 international victim countries by a wide margin. 216,633 known attacks were UK-based. In second place, Canada is 40 times less likely to fall victim to an attack with 5,000 cases.
HOW 5% OF VICTIMS PAID 50% OF THE LOSSES
Of all reported cases, 95% (33 types of crime) mainly effect consumers and count for just over half of the losses. The remaining 5% (4 types of crime), those reported mainly by businesses, account for the other half. This means the average business paid more than $100,000 compared with the average consumer paying $5,000.
