The world of cybersecurity is vast and there is all kinds of information out there. The detailed facts I provided in a previous article is only the tip of the iceberg. Naturally, there is a lot of facts out there covering all kinds of aspects of cybersecurity.
To stay up to date on everything cybersecurity, here are an assortment of facts that you may not have heard of. These will cover all kinds of areas of cybersecurity such as overall impacts, compliance, spending, jobs, and more.
Let’s begin.
5 Impactful Cybersecurity Facts
- Worldwide, we’ll be spending about $133.7 billion in cybersecurity by 2022.
- 62% of businesses experienced some level of phishing or social engineering attacks in 2018.
- The percentage of companies that are properly protected against attacks on average is only 5%.
- The most malicious email attachment types are familiar to us and use all the time: .doc and .dot. Out of all malicious attachments, these take up 37% total. The next highest file type sent is .exe at 19.5%.
- By 2020, we will have roughly 300 billion passwords that are used by both humans and machines worldwide.
10 Data Breaches And Hacking Stats
- Overall, security breaches jumped by 11% since 2018 and 67% since 2014.
- There is a hack attack almost every 39 seconds. That’s 2,244 times every day.
- Dating back to 2014, the Marriott-Starwood data was breached and impacted 500 million consumers. That breach was made public in 2018.
- In 2016 we saw a breach in Yahoo accounts affecting 3 billion. This was recorded as one of the biggest breaches in history.
- 2016 was also the year we found out that Uber had information stolen impacting 57 million drivers. Not only that but they also paid off the hackers to delete the stolen data and to keep the breach quiet.
- In 2017, 412 million users accounts were stollen from Friendfinder’s sites.
- In 2018, Under Armor reported that their “My Fitness Pal” app was hacked and it affected 150 million users.
- The Equifax breach in 2017 affected 147.9 million consumers. The breach cost over $4 billion.
10 Cyber Crime Statistics
- 94% of malware was delivered primarily through email.
- 34% of data breaches had internal actors involved.
- 51% of business in 2018 experienced denial of service attacks.
- The WannaCry virus in 2017 impacted 100,000 groups in at least 150 countries. The attack cost $4 billion and affected 400,000 machines with this virus.
- IoT (Internet of Things) devices experience an average of 5,200 attacks every month.
- The average ransomware attack costs businesses $133,000.
- 69% of organizations believe that the threats they’re seeing can’t be handled by anti-virus software.
- Ransomware detections have been more dominant in countries that have more people connected to the internet. The United States is the highest country that gets hit at 18.2% of all ransomware attacks.
- 20% of malicious domains that are created are very new. You’ll find those sites to be used in roughly 1 week after they are registered.
- 1 in 13 web requests lead to some kind of malware.
5 Cybersecurity Compliance Facts
- 53% of companies have over 1,000 sensitive files open to every employee.
- Google was fined $57 billion for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) violations by CNIL, a French data protection agency
- 88% of companies have spent over $1 million on preparing for the GDPR.
- In it’s first year, the GDPR fined $63 million to companies.
- Since the GDPR has been enacted, 31% of consumers feel that their dealings with companies have been smoother.
5 Industry Specific Cyber Stats
- Financial services have had over 350,000 sensitive files exposed. Triple the exposure of files from Healthcare, Pharma and Biotech – which totalled over 113,000 files.
- The estimated losses in 2019 in the healthcare industry overall is reported to be $25 billion.
- Attacks on supply chains in 2019 are up 78%.
- Financial services have taken the biggest hit financially with an average loss of $18.3 million per company that was surveyed.
- The highest number of attacks by ransomware is the healthcare industry. Attacks are expected to quadruple in 2020.
8 Facts On Cybersecurity Spending
- By 2020, half of security services are expected to cover about half of cybersecurity budgets for businesses.
- $3.9 million is the average cost of a data breach. The average cost of a record stolen is $150.
- Total cost of cybercrime for each company has jumped by 12% between 2017 and 2018.
- The average cost in time of a malware attack is 50 days.
- Damage pertaining to cybercrime in general is projected to be $6 trillion every year by 2021.
- The US and Middle East spend the most on post-data breach responses. US pays $1.56 million and the Middle East spends $1.43 million.
- Half of businesses with over 10,000 employees spend roughly $1 million every year on security.
- Ransomware damages will be expected to rise to $11.5 billion with an attack happening every 14 seconds.
7 Facts On Cybersecurity Jobs
- 82% of businesses report a shortage of cybersecurity skills.
- That same report states that 61% of companies believe their cybersecurity applicants aren’t qualified.
- Getting a cybersecurity job is a safe bet with that same report finding the unemployment rate for jobs in cybersecurity being 0%. It’s projected to remain there all through 2021.
- Despite the security, there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide.
- Since 2016, the demand for Data Protection Officers has jumped over 700%. This was due to GDPR demands.
- 500,000 Data Protection Officers are employed.
Any Facts You Know?
With an industry that is growing and changing every day, these facts are only scratching the surface.