Cyber attacks are growing in prominence every day – from influencing major elections to crippling businesses overnight, the role cyber warfare plays in our daily lives should not be underestimated.
In fact, billionaire investor Warren Buffett claims that cyber threats are the biggest threat to mankind and that they are bigger than threats from nuclear weapons.
We have compiled a list of relevant cyber-security statistics for you as we head into 2018:
According to data from Juniper Research, the average cost of a data breach will exceed $150 million by 2020 — and by 2019, cybercrime will cost businesses over $2 trillion — a four-fold increase from 2015.
We were still gasping at the cost of $3.8 million Microsoft said a data breach costs the average company. However, data from Juniper Research shows this amount will increase by a massive 3,947 percent to over $150 million by 2020. As your company grows, and as the Internet continues to develop at a massive pace, it might be a good idea to increase the percentage of your budget that goes towards security.
Ransomware attacks increased by 46 percent in 2018.
Research from Symantec shows that Ransomware attacks worldwide increased by 46 percent in 2018 — with more than 100 new malware families introduced by hackers. More interestingly, though, is that people, especially indians, are willing to pay. 64 percent of Indians are willing to pay a ransom after becoming victims of ransomware attacks, compared to 34 percent of people globally.
The average amount demanded after a ransomware attack is $1,077.
This is an increase of about 266 percent. Naturally, seeing that more people are willing to pay a ransom considering how reliant on the Internet their activities are, hackers are upping their stakes and demanding significantly more. We can only expect this to increase as ransomware attacks increase in 2019.
1 in 131 emails contains a malware.
Emails are now being increasingly used by hackers, and an estimated one in every 131 emails contain a malware. This is the highest rate in about five years, and it is further expected to increase as hackers attempt to use malware like ransomware to generate money from unsuspecting people.
In 2018, 9.5 percent of people are victims of identity fraud — resulting in fraudsters defrauding people of about $16 billion.
This data is based on a comprehensive study by Javelin Strategy & Research, involving 69,000 respondents who have been surveyed since 2003. The research revealed that the victims of identity fraud in the India increased to 15.4 million in 2018, an increase of 2 million people from the previous year.
43 percent of cyber attacks are aimed at small businesses.
While we’ve been reading a lot in the media about major companies like Target, eBay, Yahoo and Sony being hacked, small companies are not immune. As it is today, at least 43 percent of cyber attacks against businesses are targeted at small companies, and this number will only keep increasing.
Unfilled cyber security jobs are expected to reach 3.5 million by 2021 — compared to about 1 million in 2018.
While this might not seem like much, it is worth paying attention to: the projected increase in the number of cyber security-related jobs is proportional to a projected increase in cybercrime, and a more than 200 percent increase means we can expect cybercrime to increase by at least that much by 2021.