Cyber Chat Episode 18 – What is the cost of cyber crime?

In the penultimate episode of Cyber Chat, Rob May discusses the cost of cybercrime worldwide, to illustrate the scale of the cybersecurity problem.

Managing the ongoing cybersecurity of your IT infrastructure should be a primary concern – whatever the shape or size of your organisation. Cybersecurity breaches are the number one threat in today’s business landscape. Incidents come in many forms: cyber attacks; laptops left on trains; malicious staff; or, even more simply, accidental data loss caused by human error. The human firewall is vital as a line of defence for any organisation and in this video Rob, author of The Human Firewall (available on Amazon) explains what the Human Firewall is.

Find out more about ramsac’s cybersecurity services

Cyber Chat – Episode 18 – video transcript

Hi I’m Rob May, I’m MD of ramsac and welcome to Cyber Chat. Today, I thought I would position just how big a problem cyber is. For decades, the biggest crime worldwide was the international drugs crime and that’s no longer the top crime.

The top crime now worldwide is cyber attacks. And it’s growing at an alarming rate, In 2017 worldwide, the cost of cyberattacks was 4 trillion dollars. And I try to, I couldn’t even get my head round what 4 trillion dollars was. And I found a website that suggested that if you took $1 notes and you stack them one on top of each other 4 trillion dollars would reach the moon. It’s massive. And it’s rising by a trillion dollars per year.

So, it’s an enormous problem and there are some very sophisticated businesses worldwide that are running these businesses. We had one client, who had suffered a ransomware attack. And there was a number on the screen, and when they phoned the number. The first thing they got asked was what language technical support did they require. So, this company had got a multilingual help desk so that they could help their ‘customers’ pay their fines. Now just a word of caution there, never pay that fine, never do business with a criminal but it’s a huge, huge problem. And increasing at a rate of a trillion dollars per year worldwide.

So, you need to be aware of it and this is why it needs to be on your board agenda. So, stay safe and I look forward to speaking to you again soon, thank you.