The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) newly-released Internet Crimes Report provides an unbiased big picture of the cyber crimes that were the most used and most successful.
A few weeks ago we covered the alarming trends on ransomware, and FBI’s IC3 division took in over 880,000 complaints last year from individuals and businesses about every cyber crime being committed. Unfortunately, the details on overall cyber crime show things are not improving.
According to the report, over the last five years the data has been collected, the number of complaints and annual losses have continued to increase every year. This year’s complaints was about 10% more than the previous year, and the total losses grew just over 20% in 2023 to reach $12.5 billion.
Source: Internet Crime Report
The top five crimes (in descending order) according to the FBI were:
- Phishing (with just under 300K crimes)
- Personal Data Breach (55K)
- Non-Payment/Non-Delivery (50K)
- Extortion (48K)
- Tech Support (37K)
At a macro scale, phishing is the overwhelming attack type at nearly 6 to 1 over the next top crime.
Last year’s top five crimes were in the exact same order. So, why aren’t we stopping attacks? The answer lies in the data – phishing is the number one attack vector and continues to grow because it continues to be an effective means of tricking recipients.
In other words, the recipients themselves aren’t trained to spot malicious emails. And for organizations, given that security awareness training is readily available is just unacceptable.
It’s simple: trained users are equipped to stop attacks.
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