Global Cybercrime Will Cost Businesses $11.4 Million Per Minute by 2021

  • Cybercrime will cost more than $11 million per minute globally by 2021
  • Organizations spend on average $25 per minute to tackle malicious activity
  • Threat intelligence emerges as a key asset in defending the enterprise against cyber threats

The global cost of cybercrime has doubled since 2015. Cybercrime now costs organizations $25 per minute and will have a per-minute global cost of more than $11 million by 2021, according to a new report.

Analyzing the volume of malicious activity on the internet, RiskIQ researchers revealed that cybercrime costs organizations $24.7, a year-over-year increase of more than $2 per minute. Globally, cybercrime will cost $11.4 million a minute by 2021, twice as much as in 2015, researchers said.

The top threats facing today’s organizations are proliferating at a rate of 375 per minute, a number analysts say has been exacerbated by the current surge in attacks leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other key malicious activities are projected as follows :

  • 5 attacks per minute on computers with an Internet connection
  • 16,172 records compromised per minute
  • One vulnerability disclosed every 24 minutes
  • 5 domain infringements detected per minute
  • One Magecart attack every 16 minutes
  • One COVID-19 blacklisted domain every 15 minutes
  • 35 COVID-19 spam emails analyzed per minute

Tactics employed by malicious actors range from phishing to domain infringement to supply chain attacks that target e-commerce. Magecart hacks, for instance, have increased 30% since the COVID-19 outbreak began. Cybercriminals are after monetary gain, but they also seek to inflict large-scale reputational damage. Other motives include politics and espionage, researchers said.

“These stats show threat activity is widespread, but also show the power of threat intelligence in defending the enterprise,” RiskIQ CEO Lou Manousossaid. “More knowledge, greater awareness, and an increased effort to implement necessary security controls make a huge difference in stopping these threat actors in their tracks.”

Fueled by a Global Protective Network (GPN) protecting over 500 million systems, Bitdefender Advanced Threat Intelligence collects data from sensors across the globe to correlate hundreds of thousands of indicators of compromise and turn data into actionable, real-time insights. Security professionals leveraging Bitdefender can improve threat-hunting and forensic capabilities with contextual, actionable threat indicators on IPs, URLs, domains and files known to harbor malware, phishing, spam, fraud and other threats.