Economic losses from major payment system cyberattack pegged at $3.5T

Subjecting payment systems around the world to a catastrophic cyberattack could result in a $3.5 trillion loss in global gross domestic product over a five-year period, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Such a hypothetical intrusion, which has been modeled by Lloyd's of London and the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies to involve simultaneous compromise of tens of thousands of partner and customer networks to facilitate a major data breach, has a nearly 3.3% likelihood of occurring over a 30 year period and is expected to most severly hit the U.S., China, and Japan. "The global interconnectedness of cyber means it is too substantial a risk for one sector to face alone and therefore we must continue to share knowledge, expertise and innovative ideas across government, industry and the insurance market to ensure we build society's resilience against the potential scale of this risk," said Lloyd's Chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown.