Cybercrime Activity Targeting Consumers Is Becoming Easier To Commit

The Office for National Statistics has released its crime data for England and Wales which shows that 6 million fraud and cyber crimes are committed every year, this is equal to 1 in 10 people affected. Cyber Security expert Ryan Rubin, Managing Director at global advisory firm Protiviti commented below. He has some interesting views on the increasing number of cyber fraud events and how companies are responding to this Risk.

 Ryan Rubin, Managing Director at IT Security & Privacy:

“By including virus incidents into these numbers, they may skew the cyber crime results targeting individuals. We need to dig deeper into these incidents before drawing broader conclusions on their impact on consumers.

However, Cybercrime activity targeting consumers is becoming easier to commit due to the availability of marketplaces for buying customized malware toolkits – e.g  for phishing and ransomware.

Given the wide attack surface of digital devices – often left unpatched and unmanaged, there are a lot of opportunities to take advantage of softer consumer targets – there are literally millions of digital devices out there from phones to Internet enabled lights, cars and fridges that can be targeted. “