Digital economy is growing everywhere in the world. Technology is changing our livelihoods in unprecedented ways. We cannot imagine life without internet or without using technology in our day-to-day chores. It has certainly altered the nature’s way of evolution, but it also means that there is a very different kind of warfare happening all the time. Cyber attacks have been in the news in past decade and they only seem to increase causing more damage to businesses, raking more money for the exploits.

Here are some facts to look at-

Cybersecurity Facts

1. In 2017 alone, 70% of organizations believed their security risk increased massively. (Ponemon Institute)
2. Just the number of passwords used by bots as well as humans would grow to 300 billion. (SC Media)
3. Small business are more vulnerable to cyber attacks, almost 43 percent. (Small Business Trends)
4. Almost 200,000 new variants of malware are produced each day and likely the number is growing every year (Panda Security)
5. Very important, on average an organization takes over six months, or around 197 days to detect a data breach. (ZD Net)
6. Windows and Android are number one and two on the most targeted platforms list. (Computer World)
7. With the advent of Cryto currencies, Crypto Jacking is the new trend and has hit over 3 million systems between January and May 2018. (Quick Heal)
8. The number of mobile crypto jacking malware variants grew from 8 variants in 2017 to 25 variants by May 2018 – making a 3x increase. (Quick Heal)

Cybersecurity is damaging the business heavily

1. The information security market is expected to grow 8.7% in 2019 to $124bn, driven in part by spending on consultation and implementation services related to the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy legislation. (Computer Weekly)
2. Overall cost of a successful cyber attack is over $5 million. (Ponemon)
3. The biggest loss during an attack is loss of sensitive information, which might lead to espionage as well. This constitutes almost 43 percent of costs. (Accenture)
4. Damage related to cybercrime is projected to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021. (CyberSecurity Ventures)
5. One of biggest breach of our times, the Equifax breach, estimated cost to the company was over $4 billion in total. (Time)
6. Malware and web-based attacks are the two most costly attack types — companies spent an average of US $2.4 million in defense. (Accenture)

Ransomware figures

1. More than 4,000 ransomware attacks occur every day. (FBI)
2. An updated endpoint detection system is not enough,  75% of organizations infected with ransomware were running up-to-date endpoint protection. (Sophos)
3. In 2019 alone, Ransomware is expected to causes damages worth $11 bn. (Cybersecurity Ventures)
4. The frequency of attacks on businesses are significantly going to increase. Likely It is estimated there will be a ransomware attack on businesses every 14 seconds by the end of 2019, up from every 40 seconds in 2016. This does exclude assaults on people, which happens much more every now and again than organizations. (Cybersecurity Ventures)
5. Spear phishing has become extremely common with social engineering. 91% of cyberattacks begin with a spear phishing email, to deliver the malicious code. (KnowBe4)

Phishing

1. In an overview of more than 1,300 IT leaders, 56% of associations recognized focused on phishing assaults as their greatest current cybersecurity danger. (CyberArk)
2. A staggering 76% of businesses reported being a victim of a phishing attack in the last year. (Wombat Security)
3. Verizon reports that clients in the U.S open 30 percent of phishing messages, with 12 percent of those focused by these messages tapping on the contaminated connections. (Verizon)
4. Kaspersky’s Anti-Phishing framework was activated multiple times in 2017. The security organization states more than 91 million all the more phishing framework triggers were set off in 2017 more than 2016. (Kaspersky)

With one month already gone in 2019, it is time to constantly look out for better security products and stay cyber secure, especially if you are a SME/MSME.