Cyber crime costs predicted to hit $10.5 trillion per year by 2025

Cybersecurity Ventures, a trusted resource for cyber security statistics and predictions, predicts global cyber crime costs will reach $10.5 trillion by 2025.

This would more than triple the $3 trillion in cyber crime in 2015 and represent a 15% annual increase for each of the next five years. The projected total represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history and is a huge risk for innovation and investment.

To put it in perspective, this would greatly exceed the annual damage from worldwide natural disasters. This would also be more profitable than illegal drug trade worldwide.

"Cybercrime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm," said Steve Morgan, founder of Cybersecurity Ventures and editor-in-chief at Cybercrime Magazine.

Cybersecurity Ventures and INTRUSION, Inc., a provider of entity identification, high-speed data mining, cyber crime and advanced persistent threat detection products, have worked together to provide thought leadership and guidance to US and global chief information security officers and cyber security teams.

"Cyber criminals know they can hold businesses and our economy hostage through breaches, ransomware, denial of service attacks and more. This is cyberwarfare, and we need to shift our mindset around cybersecurity in order to protect against it," said Jack B. Blount, president and CEO, INTRUSION, Inc.

With the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risk Report estimating as little as 0.05% of organized cyber crime being prosecuted and many cyber criminal organizations joining forces, every American organization risks becoming a cyber crime victim.

"Every American organization, in the public and private sector, has been or will be hacked, is infected with malware, and is a target of hostile nation-state cyber intruders," said Blount.

Some of the top cyber warfare and cyber security experts in the US, along with Fortune 500 chief information security officers (CISO), backed up Blount’s claims during a roundtable discussion. The participants discussed their concerns about the sophistication, intensity, scale, and growing number of cyber attacks on US businesses of all types and sizes.