How much does cybercrime cost in sheer monetary value? More than the economies of most countries.
A new report by US-based firm Cybersecurity Ventures, has found that cybercrime is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021.
“Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 per cent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015,” the report said.
“If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the US and China" added the report.
Cybercrime as a country, therefore, would be far ahead of India, which according to 2019’s tally, is ranked fifth in economy.
This implies that global cybercrime costs had already surpassed the size of the Indian economy a few years ago. Cybercrime would also be ahead of Japan and Germany’s economies.
Cybersecurity Ventures also estimated that global cybercrime costs would grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015.
This amount would be larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.
The report also explains what counts as “cybercrime costs." 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 are all part of it.
With the Covid-19 pandemic which has pushed the entire world into a global work-from-home experiment, more employees than ever in history are working from home - and as majority of this work relies on the Internet to stay connected, and official documents, files which usually have restricted permission become a lot more privy to hacking as they go online.
As more people share data remotely through cloud apps, the number of security blind spots continue to increase.
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