Best Practices 10 Facts About Cybercrime You Need to Know in 2018 By Ciara Noonan | 3 minute read 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. Subscribe to Blog