GLOBAL CYBERCRIME If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. RANSOMWARE A 2017 report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicted ransomware damages would cost the world $5 billion in 2017, up from $325 million in 2015 — a 15X increase in just two years. The damages for 2018 were estimated at $8 billion, and for 2019 the figure rose to $11.5 billion. The latest forecast is for global ransomware damage costs to reach $20 billion by 2021 — which is 57X more than it was in 2015. We predict there will be a ransomware attack on businesses every 11 seconds by 2021, up from every 40 seconds in 2016.  Read Less

Looking ahead... the latest facts, figures, predictions, and statistics from Cybersecurity Ventures. See more at CybersecurityVentures.com - There will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by 2021 — enough to fill 50 NFL stadiums — according to Cybersecurity Ventures. This is up from Cisco’s previous estimation of 1 million cybersecurity openings in 2014. The cybersecurity unemployment rate is at zero percent in 2019, where it’s been since 2011. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cybercrime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021 – exponentially more than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. Ransomware damage costs are predicted to be 57X more in 2021 than they were in 2015. This makes ransomware the fastest growing type of cybercrime. Global ransomware damage costs are predicted to hit $20 billion in 2021, up from $11.5 billion in 2019, $5 billion in 2017, and just $325 million in 2015, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Cybersecurity Ventures expects that businesses will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds by 2021, up from every 14 seconds in 2019, and every 40 seconds in 2016. Global spending on security awareness training for employees — one of the fastest growing categories in the cybersecurity industry — is predicted to reach $10 billion by 2027, according to Cybersecurity Ventures (up from around $1 billion in 2014.) Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the total amount of data stored in the cloud — which includes public clouds operated by vendors and social media companies (think AWS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), government-owned clouds that are accessible to citizens and businesses, and private clouds owned by mid-to-large-sized corporations — will be 100X greater in 2022 than it is today. Despite promises from biometrics and facial recognition developers of a future with no more passwords — which may, in fact, come to pass at one point in the far-out future — a report from Cybersecurity Ventures finds that the world will need to cyber protect 300 billion passwords globally by 2020. There were nearly 4 billion Internet users in 2018 (nearly half of the world’s population of 7.7 billion), up from 2 billion in 2015. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that there will be 6 billion Internet users by 2022 (75 percent of the projected world population of 8 billion) — and more than 7.5 billion Internet users by 2030 (90 percent of the projected world population of 8.5 billion, 6 years of age and older). Ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations are predicted to quadruple between 2017 and 2020, and will grow to 5X by 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the healthcare industry will spend more than $65 billion cumulatively on cybersecurity products and services from 2017 to 2021. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that global spending on cybersecurity products and services will exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021 — and the cybersecurity market will continue growing by 12-15 percent year-over-year through 2021. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the global blockchain market will exceed $40 billion by 2025. In 2019, Cybersecurity Ventures expects that Fortune 500 and Global 2000 chief information security officers (CISOs) will reduce the number of point security products/solutions in use at their corporations by 15-18 percent. That trend is expected to continue over the next 5 years. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that 100 percent of large corporations (Fortune 500, Global 2000) globally will have a CISO or equivalent position by 2021 (up from 70 percent in 2018), although many of them will be unfilled due to a lack of experienced candidates. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that women will represent 20 percent of the global cybersecurity workforce by the end of 2019. This recalculates a 6-year old figure based on a limited survey that concluded women held just 11 percent of cybersecurity positions.  Read Less