Cyber crime to cost $10.5tn annually by 2025
Source: Middle East Insurance Review | Feb 2021
Global cyber crime costs will grow by 15% per year over the next five years to $10.5tn annually by 2025 – up from $3tn in 2015.
A new analysis by cyber security firm Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that this is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted by natural disasters in a year and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.
Cybersecurity Ventures founder Steve Morgan said, “Cyber crime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.”
Intrusion Inc president and CEO Jack B Blount said, “Cyber criminals know they can hold businesses — and our economy — hostage through breaches, ransomware, denial of service attacks and more. This is cyber warfare and we need to shift our mindset around cyber security in order to protect against it.”
Organised cyber crime entities are joining forces and their likelihood of detection and prosecution is estimated to be as low as 0.05% in the US according to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 global risk report.
Mr Blount said, “Every American organisation — in the public and private sector — has been or will be hacked, is infected with malware, and is a target of hostile nation-state cyber intruders.”
Mr Blount’s assessment was backed up by some of the nation’s top cyber warfare and cyber security experts and Fortune 500 chief information security officers in a roundtable discussion which recently aired on the cyber crime radio podcast channel. M