We all know time is money but when it comes to cybercrime even a minute of down time could cost the mightiest of firms a hefty fine resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.
In 2016, cybercrime cost $856,164 every minute or $450 billion a year in the U.S., causing businesses to spend up to $142,694 per minute to defend against external cyber threats, according to RiskIQ Intelligence report “The Evil Internet Minute.”
The report was meant to shine light on the growth of cybercrime over the years and how prevalent attacks have become. Despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to secure and defend companies, a barrage of 1,214 ransomware attacks per minute coupled with 818 new unique pieces of malware created per minute, and 108,333 phishing emails sent per minute result in 1,080 victims every minute.
In addition there are .3 new blacklisted apps per minute, 100 new phishing pages created per minute and 14.5 malvertising incidents per minute meaning there are plenty of ways users can stumble into a the social engineering tactics of threat actors.
Although it may seem like an overwhelming number of attack and relatively high amount of malicious activity within an internet minute, researchers say it important to consider other the likelihood of these threats targeting a particular industry.
“It's important to know which threats your industry is most susceptible to,” RiskIQ Threat Researcher Mike Wyatt told SC Media. “For example, financial services firms are particularly prone to being targeted by mobile apps claiming to be affiliated with a financial institution, which may try to phish for credentials and other sensitive information.”
Despite the digital threats, Wyatt added the fact that there is technology available to detect these threats should be encouraging and that it's become apparent that manual, siloed processes are overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of today's digital threats.
It's important to start looking at solutions offering big data and automation to empower security teams to operate at internet scale to equal the threat actors' offensive capabilities,” he added.
