Cost of cybercrime set to hit $8 trillion by 2022 with billions of records hacked

The cost of cybercrime will rise to $8 billion over the next five years, with billions of hacked customer records finding their way online, according to a newly released research paper.
 
The paper from Juniper Research estimates that 2.8 billion customer data records are expected to be stolen this year, increasing to 5 billion by 2022. Despite finding that new and innovative cybersecurity solutions are emerging, the paper found they won’t be able to keep pace with more and more devices getting connected to the Internet.
 
Small to medium-sized enterprises are expected to be the main source of data breaches, with the paper finding most on average will spend less than $4,000 on cybersecurity measures this year and most planning only small increases security spending over the next five years. The risk for these businesses is compounded by the fact that many tend to run older software, from operating systems to industry-specific software no longer supported with security patches.
 
“The attacks on hospital infrastructure show that inadequate cybersecurity can now cost lives as well as money,” Juniper research author James Moar said. “Businesses of all sizes need to find the time and budget to upgrade and secure their systems, or lose the ability to perform their jobs safely, or at all.”
 
Poor defense strategies alone won’t account for all the increased costs and data breaches. The research also found that the greater availability of ransomware toolkits that require little to no programming skills to deploy are also playing a serious role in the increasing levels of cybercrime. As security firm Trend Micro Inc. found in a separate report published in July, so-called “ransomware as a service” is unstoppable and this Juniper report backs that finding up.

---