A security definition: Cybercrime
“Cybercrime: More lucrative than the drugs trade, cybercrime is now worth 0.8% of the global economy. If cybercrime was a country, its GDP would rank 27th – above Singapore, Austria and Denmark.”
A recent report by McAfee calculates cybercrime to cost £266bn every year with the UK ranking 5th in the G20 countries most affected, with an annual loss of £6.8bn attributed to cybercrime.
In 2015, 93% of large corporations and 87% of small to medium sized companies suffered data breaches, with the average cost of an attack worth £770,000 and £60,000 respectively. A report by Juniper Research in 2015 suggested that the rapid digitisation of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.
Is Cybercrime really a more profitable crime sector than narcotics?
Cyber criminals run highly organised and collaborative enterprises that operate with highly destructive efficiency. It’s not the first time that cybercrime has been compared with narcotics. The Juniper Research report stated “The cyber black market has evolved from a varied landscape of discrete, ad hoc individuals into a network of highly organised groups, often connected with traditional crime groups (e.g., drug cartels, mafias, terrorist cells) and nation-states”.
Even when the goals of the attackers are not monetary gain, the costs can be enormous. Data breaches can include financial data, personally identifiable information e.g. personal health information (PHI) and Intellectual Property. Sony’s cyber attack in 2014 resulted in the loss of billions of dollars through data breach, whilst many attacks are aimed at preventing access to services.
Jobs are also on the line as the McAfee report also suggests that cybercrime leads to 150,000 job losses in Europe every year. It warns that “the cost of cybercrime will continue to increase as more business functions move online and as more companies and consumers around the world connect to the internet”.
Cybercrime is now a fact of life
Cybercrime is no longer an emerging threat and is now a fact of life that faces everyone in modern society not just business and large enterprise. Phishing, ransomware, social engineering frauds have exploded in popularity over the last year and are showing no signs of abating.
The majority of our work goes into helping organisations prevent, monitor and manage cyber attack incidents, but we have worked with the police force to improve the capability of their cyber crime units to recognise attacks and provide preventative and remediative advice.
The tips below on ‘how to protect yourself from cybercrime ‘ from the National Crime Agency are a great start.
Cybercrime happens all day every day
At the time of writing the Breach Level Index reports that over 5.3 Billion Data Records globally have been lost or stolen since 2013. That’s an average of 3.9 Million records per day. And based on the figures by the Financial Fraud Action UK, a fraud incident takes place in the United Kingdom every 15 seconds.
We can help
Concerned that your organisation isn’t prepared for a breach or worried that you might have been breached? We can help. From stress testing your security strategy and working with board level and executive leaders to strengthen the Cyber Culture of your organisation, to hands on the ground support in preparing your security ecosystem and responding to incidents. Infosec Partners are proven experts in full-spectrum cybersecurity and a team you can trust.
For your free consultation, complete the adjacent form or to speak with trusted advisor immediately call us on +44 (0)1256 893662.
