Damages as a result of cyber crime are expected to reach more than $27 billion by 2025.
In 2019, authorities received an unprecedented 467 361 Internet-facilitated fraud complaints, with accumulated losses of more than $3.5 billion.
However, in 2020, lockdowns might be the catalyst for the biggest hacker attack outbreak to date.
These were some of the findings from a report by Atlas VPN estimations, which predicts a 45% increase in cyber crime damages in comparison to the previous year, meaning that the estimated monetary losses will reach over $5 billion in 2020.
“Due to the pandemic, people are stuck at home, surfing the Web, and working remotely," says Rachel Welsh, COO of Atlas VPN. "We can expect a record number of hacker attacks in 2020 since the pool for potential cyber crime victims has never been larger. Also, the latest cyber crime trends show that hackers are focusing on human layer errors more than ever.”
According to Atlas VPN, monetary damages caused by cyber crime increased over four times in the last six years - from $800 million in 2014 to $3.5 billion last year.
In 2019, cyber crimes that resulted in the most financial damages were business e-mail compromise (BEC), romance fraud, and spoofing.
Out of these, BEC accounted for over half of the losses, with a whopping $1.77 billion, followed by romance fraud, which amounted to over $475 million in losses, and spoofing with $300 million.
