Cybercrime costs to reach $6 trillion by 2021

Cybercrime costs are projected to reach $2 trillion by 2019 predicts Juniper Research, and $6 trillion by 2021 posits Cybersecurity Ventures. Cybercrime has already cost U.K. business over £1 billion in the past year according to the U.K.’s national fraud and cybercrime reporting center. And the 2016 Norton Cyber Security Insights Report states that global cybercrime hit $126 billion in 2015 and probably affected 689 million people in 2015, one of the lowest estimations of the global cybercrime cost.
 
Cybercrime is one of the biggest challenges that humanity will face in the next 20 years. Our economies are becoming more dependent on technology, and thus more vulnerable to emerging variations of cybercrime and e-fraud. A recent study by the World Economic Forum (WEF) indicates that, with the exception of the U.S., most countries have underplayed the risks of cyberattacks on their economic well-being. Stagnation of the global economy, caused by unresolved fundamental economic problems, is also eliminating the middle class in developed countries and increasing inequality. Fundamental economic problems, described in numerous works of the economist Joseph Stiglitz, are aggravating, and aggravated by, cybercrime.
 
Cybercrime is both a technical and an economic problem, so cannot be solved by technical means alone. Desperate investors, scared by negative interest rates and high volatility on the global financial markets, invest in VCs that transfer their cash into cybersecurity startups. Meanwhile, cybercrime costs steadily outperform the billions invested into cybersecurity.
 
Europol's Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2016 report highlights two particularly interesting trends in global cybercrime. The first is cybercrime-as-a-service, which enables anyone to hack a competitor or shut down its business via a major DDoS attack at a very modest price. Crypto currencies also make it possible to pay for criminal services in almost total anonymity. Such cases are difficult to investigate due to the nature of the technology attackers use to preserve their anonymity, as well as the ease with which digital evidence can be tampered with. At my firm, we've already seen cases where companies paid to hack themselves on behalf of a competitor in order to frame them, trigger an investigation, and file a lawsuit on the fake hack.
 
The second trend is ransomware. As per Trend Micro’s report, ransomware has almost doubled in the first half of 2016 with a 172% growth in comparison to the past year. Meanwhile, even the U.S. Police have paid ransom to get their data back from cybercriminals. Ransomware is a great example of a solid economic model of cybercrime business. Prior to ransomware, cybercriminals risked not getting paid, even if they were successful in stealing the data or shutting down a system. But with ransomware, well-prepared malware and the right selection of victims guarantees regular income. Victims have no choice but to pay in order to get their data back, as the price of data recovery is higher than the random. So I expect the ransomware approach to skyrocket in the near future, when attackers will lock not only your computers and phones, but also your smart watches and other connected devices.
 
The statistics surrounding inequality and poverty might help answer this question. The United States, a global cybersecurity leader, is the richest yet most unequal country in the world. According to official statistics provided by the U.S. government, 43.1 million people lived in poverty in the U.S. in 2015. And according to the USDA, roughly 12.7% of U.S. households didn't have reliable access to affordable food at some point during that year. These stats are only compounded in developing countries.

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