Have you ever wondered if your business is at risk of a cybercrime attack? What are the realities of cybercrime and how can it affect business owners and larger organizations?
Here, we lay out some statistics about email, spam and cybercrime as a whole that can help you answer the questions you have about the online safety of your business.
10 Facts About Cybercrime You Need to Know in 2018:
- In April 2018, the average daily legitimate email was 64.91 billion in comparison to the average daily spam volume of 374.90 billion. [Cisco Talos]
The average daily spam volume amount still hugely surpasses the average legitimate email on a daily basis.
- 7,710 organizations are hit by a Business Email Compromise scam every month. [Symantec]
- In 2017, the proportion of email-borne malware that comprises a malicious URL, rather than an attachment, grew by 10.7% to 12.3%. [Symantec]
Cybercrime is ever-evolving and this includes spam emails. Users tend to be less wary about URLs than an attachment and so the growth of malicious URLs was imminent. - The US is listed as the number one spam-enabling country, followed by China in second place with Russia coming in third. [Spamhaus]
Also included in the Top 10 are Ukraine, UK, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Brazil and Turkey.
- The US is also the most targeted country, accounting for 27% of cyber attacks over the past three years. [Symantec]
- 87% of data breaches took mere minutes to compromise the data they are after; however, 68% of breaches go unnoticed for months or even more. [Verizon]
It takes minutes for cybercriminals to collect the data they need from your system, but it could take months—sometimes even more—for a breach to even be noticed. By then the damage has already been done. - Cybercrime is the fastest growing crime in the US. [Cybercrime Ventures]
- By 2021 the total number of business and consumer email sent and received is expected to grow to 319.6 billion, growing at an average annual rate of 4.4%. [Email Statistics Report, 2017-2021, The Radicati Group]
With the growth of email, comes the inevitable growth of spam. Protect your business from threat with an inbound email filter. - By 2019, it is predicted that there will be a ransomware attack on a business every 14 seconds. It currently stands at an attack every 40 seconds. [Cybersecurity Ventures]
Ransomware attacks are becoming more commonplace for businesses of all sizes and can cause endless hassle and high cost to resolve. - Damage costs for cybercrime with reach $6 trillion annually by 2021, double 2015’s figure of $3 trillion annually. [CSO Online]
In just six short years, it is predicted that the damage costs of ransomware will double. Previously, we saw that the profits of cybercrime have reached $1.5 trillion so it’s no surprise that the figure of damage costs are rising in accordance with this.