If Cybercrime was a Country, it Would be the Third Largest Economy: Report

Cybercrime is predicted to be the world's third-largest economy after the U.S. and China

As organizations go digital, so does crime. Today, cybercrime is a massive business in its own right, and cybercriminals everywhere are clamoring to get a piece of the action as companies and consumers invest trillions to stake their claims in the digital universe. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is predicted to inflict damages totaling USD 6 trillion globally in 2021 would be the world's third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. Cybercrime as a country, therefore, would be far ahead of India, which is ranked fifth in the economy.

Cybercrime is a growing concern and also less risky than committing traditional crimes such as bank robbery, etc. According to some cybersecurity reports, we can expect global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching USD 10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from USD 3 trillion in 2015. This amount would be larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history and cyberattack risks making a case for incentives for innovation and investment.

Cybercrime would be the third largest economy:

Organized crime gang hacking activities and a cyberattack surface will be an order of magnitude greater in 2025. In fact, in terms of earnings, cybercrime puts even Tesla, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Walmart to shame. Their combined annual revenue totals just $1.28 trillion. Today's cybercriminals are more polished. Cybercriminals evaluate the risk and rewards of their ventures to maximize their gains, negatively impacting the world's economy with the business losses they trigger.

With the Covid-19 pandemic which has pushed the entire world into a global work-from-home experiment, more employees than ever in history are working from home – and as the majority of this work relies on the Internet to stay connected, and official documents, files which usually have restricted permission become a lot more privier to hacking as they go online. Cybercrime doesn't just strike the usual suspects like servers and computers.

The cybercrime markets have also split up into groups as the bad guys take pains to gather in secretive, exclusive discussion boards to avoid scrutiny from police and fraudsters. This implies that global cybercrime costs had already surpassed the size of the Indian economy a few years ago. The value of a business depends largely on how well it guards its data, the strength of its cybersecurity, and its level of cyber resilience.