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Juniper Research: Cybercrime to Cost Businesses $2.1 Trillion by 2019

Network intruders become increasingly professional.

A new study from Juniper Research, Hampshire, United Kingdom, suggests that the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.

The study, The Future of Cybercrime & Security: Financial & Corporate Threats & Mitigation, finds that the majority of these breaches will come from existing information technology and network infrastructure. While new threats targeting mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) are being reported at an increasing rate, the number of infected devices is minimal compared to traditional computing devices.

The report also highlights the increasing professionalism of cybercrime, with the emergence of cybercrime products (i.e. sale of malware creation software) over the past year, as well as the decline in casual activist hacks. Hacktivism has become more successful and less prolific, leading Juniper experts to expect fewer but more successful hacktivist attacks.

“Currently, we aren’t seeing much dangerous mobile or IoT malware because it’s not profitable,” says report author James Moar. “The kind of threats we will see on these devices will be either ransomware, with consumers’ devices locked down until they pay the hackers to use their devices, or as part of botnets, where processing power is harnessed as part of a more lucrative hack. With the absence of a direct payout from IoT hacks, there is little motive for criminals to develop the required tools.”

The research also indicates that nearly 60 percent of anticipated data breaches worldwide in 2015 will occur in North America. The proportion will decrease over time, however, as other countries become both richer and more digitized. In addition, the average cost of a data breach will exceed $150 million by 2020 as more business infrastructure gets connected.

The research notes that leading players such as Apple, Google and Amazon are best positioned to capitalize on the transition, with each now offering cloud-based solutions both for personal storage and premium content access. It argues that if consumers are tied into multiple products from one of the leading players, those consumers become increasingly reluctant to turn away and risk losing access to content across their devices.

The white paper, Cybercrime & the Internet of Threats, is available to download from the new Juniper Research website together with further details of the full research and interactive dataset.