Cybercrime To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025

Special Report: Cyberwarfare In The C-Suite.

– Steve Morgan, Editor-in-Chief

Sausalito, Calif. – Nov. 13, 2020

If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China.

Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.

The damage cost estimation is based on historical cybercrime figures including recent year-over-year growth, a dramatic increase in hostile nation-state sponsored and organized crime gang hacking activities, and a cyberattack surface which will be an order of magnitude greater in 2025 than it is today.

Cybercrime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.

CYBERCRIME HITS HOME

The United States, the world’s largest economy with a nominal GDP of nearly $21.5 trillion, constitutes one-fourth of the world economy, according to data from Nasdaq.

Cybercrime has hit the U.S. so hard that in 2018 a supervisory special agent with the FBI who investigates cyber intrusions told The Wall Street Journal that every American citizen should expect that all of their data (personally identifiable information) has been stolen and is on the dark web — a part of the deep web — which is intentionally hidden and used to conceal and promote heinous activities. Some estimates put the size of the deep web (which is not indexed or accessible by search engines) at as much as 5,000 times larger than the surface web, and growing at a rate that defies quantification.

The dark web is also where cybercriminals buy and sell malware, exploit kits, and cyberattack services, which they use to strike victims — including businesses, governments, utilities, and essential service providers on U.S. soil.

A cyberattack could potentially disable the economy of a city, state or our entire country.

In his 2016 New York Times bestseller — Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath — Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the U.S. is shockingly unprepared.

Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffet calls cybercrime the number one problem with mankind, and cyberattacks a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear weapons.

A bullseye is squarely on our nation’s businesses.

Organized cybercrime entities are joining forces, and their likelihood of detection and prosecution is estimated to be as low as 0.05 percent in the U.S., according to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risk Report.

RANSOMWARE

Ransomware — a malware that infects computers (and mobile devices) and restricts their access to files, often threatening permanent data destruction unless a ransom is paid — has reached epidemic proportions globally and is the “go-to method of attack” for cybercriminals.

A 2017 report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicted ransomware damages would cost the world $5 billion in 2017, up from $325 million in 2015 — a 15X increase in just two years. The damages for 2018 were estimated at $8 billion, and for 2019 the figure rose to $11.5 billion.

The latest forecast is for global ransomware damage costs to reach $20 billion by 2021 — which is 57X more than it was in 2015.

We predict there will be a ransomware attack on businesses every 11 seconds by 2021, up from every 40 seconds in 2016.

The FBI is particularly concerned with ransomware hitting healthcare providers, hospitals, 911 and first responders. These types of cyberattacks can impact the physical safety of American citizens, and this is the forefront of what Herb Stapleton, FBI cyber division section chief, and his team are focused on.

Last month, ransomware claimed its first life. German authorities reported a ransomware attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

Ransomware, now the fastest growing and one of the most damaging types of cybercrime, will ultimately convince senior executives to take the cyber threat more seriously, according to Mark Montgomery, executive director at the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) — but he hopes it doesn’t come to that.

CYBER ATTACK SURFACE

The modern definition of the word “hack” was coined at MIT in April 1955. The first known mention of computer (phone) hacking occurred in a 1963 issue of The Tech. Over the past fifty-plus years, the world’s attack surface has evolved from phone systems to a vast datasphere outpacing humanity’s ability to secure it.

In 2013, IBM proclaimed data promises to be for the 21st century what steam power was for the 18th, electricity for the 19th and hydrocarbons for the 20th.

“We believe that data is the phenomenon of our time,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Corp.’s executive chairman, in 2015, addressing CEOs, CIOs and CISOs from 123 companies in 24 industries at a conference in New York City. “It is the world’s new natural resource. It is the new basis of competitive advantage, and it is transforming every profession and industry. If all of this is true — even inevitable — then cyber crime, by definition, is the greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world.”

The world will store 200 zettabytes of data by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. This includes data stored on private and public IT infrastructures, on utility infrastructures, on private and public cloud data centers, on personal computing devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones — and on IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half the U.S. labor force is working from home, according to Stanford University. As employees generate, access, and share more data remotely through cloud apps, the number of security blind spots balloons.

It’s predicted that the total amount of data stored in the cloud — which includes public clouds operated by vendors and social media companies (think Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.), government-owned clouds that are accessible to citizens and businesses, private clouds owned by mid-to-large-sized corporations, and cloud storage providers — will reach 100 zettabytes by 2025, or 50 percent of the world’s data at that time, up from approximately 25 percent stored in the cloud in 2015.

Roughly one million more people join the internet every day. We expect there will be 6 billion people connected to the internet interacting with data in 2022, up from 5 billion in 2020 — and more than 7.5 billion internet users in 2030.

Cyber threats have expanded from targeting and harming computers, networks, and smartphones — to people, cars, railways, planes, power grids and anything with a heartbeat or an electronic pulse. Many of these Things are connected to corporate networks in some fashion, further complicating cybersecurity.

By 2023, there will be 3X more networked devices on Earth than humans, according to a report from Cisco. And by 2022, 1 trillion networked sensors will be embedded in the world around us, with up to 45 trillion in 20 years.

IP traffic has reached an annual run rate of 2.3 zettabytes in 2020, up from an annual run rate of 870.3 exabytes in 2015.

Data is the building block of the digitized economy, and the opportunities for innovation and malice around it are incalculable.

CYBERSECURITY SPENDING

In 2004, the global cybersecurity market was worth $3.5 billion — and in 2017 it was worth more than $120 billion. The cybersecurity market grew by roughly 35X during that 13-year period — prior to the latest market sizing by Cybersecurity Ventures.

Global spending on cybersecurity products and services for defending against cybercrime is projected to exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021.

“Most cybersecurity budgets at U.S. organizations are increasing linearly or flat, but the cyberattacks are growing exponentially,” says CSC’s Montgomery. This simple observation should be a wake-up call for C-suite executives.

Healthcare has lagged behind other industries and the tantalizing target on its back is attributable to outdated IT systems, fewer cybersecurity protocols and IT staff, extremely valuable data, and the pressing need for medical practices and hospitals to pay ransoms quickly to regain data. The healthcare industry will respond by spending $125 billion cumulatively from 2020 to 2025 to beef up its cyber defenses.

The FY 2020 U.S. President’s Budget includes $17.4 billion of budget authority for cybersecurity-related activities, a $790 million (5 percent) increase above the FY 2019 estimate, according to The White House. Due to the sensitive nature of some activities, this amount does not represent the entire cyber budget.

Cybersecurity Ventures anticipates 12-15 percent year-over-year cybersecurity market growth through 2025. While that may be a respectable increase, it pales in comparison to the cybercrime costs incurred.

SMALL BUSINESS

“There are 30 million small businesses in the U.S. that need to stay safe from phishing attacks, malware spying, ransomware, identity theft, major breaches and hackers who would compromise their security,” says Scott Schober, author of the popular books “Hacked Again” and “Cybersecurity Is Everybody’s Business.”

More than half of all cyberattacks are committed against small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs), and 60 percent of them go out of business within six months of falling victim to a data breach or hack.

66 percent of SMBs had at least one cyber incident in the past two years, according to Mastercard.

“Small and medium sized businesses lack the financial resources and skill set to combat the emerging cyber threat,” says Scott E. Augenbaum, former supervisory special agent at the FBI’s Cyber Division, Cyber Crime Fraud Unit, where he was responsible for managing the FBI’s Cyber Task Force Program and Intellectual Property Rights Program.

A Better Business Bureau survey found that for small businesses — which make up more than 97 percent of total businesses in North America — the primary challenges for more than 55 percent of them in order to develop a cybersecurity plan are a lack of resources or knowledge.

Ransomware attacks are of particular concern. “The cost of ransomware has skyrocketed and that’s a huge concern for small businesses — and it doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight,” adds Schober.

AI AUGMENTS CYBER DEFENDERS

You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

The U.S. has a total employed cybersecurity workforce consisting of nearly 925,000 people, and there are currently almost 510,000 unfilled positions, according to Cyber Seek, a project supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Faced with a domestic worker shortage, the heads of U.S. cyber defense forces — CIOs and CISOs at America’s mid-sized to largest businesses — are beginning to augment their staff with next-generation AI and ML (machine learning) software and appliances aimed at detecting cyber intruders. These AI systems are trained on big data sets collected over decades — and they can analyze terabytes of data per day, a scale unimaginable for humans.

The panacea for a CISO is an AI system resembling a human expert’s investigative and reporting techniques so that cyber threats are remediated BEFORE the damage is done.

If enemies are using AI to launch cyberattacks, then our country’s businesses need to use AI to defend themselves.

FOR THE BOARDROOM

Cybersecurity begins at the top.

CSC has an urgent message for boardroom and C-suite executives: The status quo in cyberspace is unacceptable, which is spelled out in its groundbreaking 2020 Report which proposes a strategy of layered cyber deterrence — to protect all U.S. businesses and governments from cybercrime and cyberwarfare. But, this is hardly the first warning. “Some of the same things we’re recommending today, we were pushing 23 years ago,” says Montgomery.

Someone should be in the boardroom who will wave the red flag and get everyone else paying attention to the severity of cyber risks. Montgomery says attention is the number one priority, not bringing in a new CISO — instead empower the CISO that you have.

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.

If there’s one takeaway from this report, then let it be this: Don’t let your boardroom be the weakest cybersecurity link.

– Steve Morgan is founder and Editor-in-Chief at Cybersecurity Ventures.

Go here to read all of my blogs and articles covering cybersecurity. Go here to send me story tips, feedback and suggestions.

VIENNA — Cocaine production, seizures and use all hit record highs in 2023, the UN drug agency said on Thursday, with the illicit drug’s market the world’s fastest-growing.

Illegal production jumped to 3,708 tons, nearly 34 percent more than in 2022, and more than four times higher than 10 years earlier, when it was at a low, the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in its annual report.

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The current surge is mainly due to an increase in the size of the area under illicit coca bush cultivation in Colombia and updated yield data, it added.

READ: Aiming a blow at narcos, Colombia pays farmers to uproot coca

Global cocaine seizures, too, recorded a high of 2,275 tons, marking a 68 percent rise in the four years to 2023.

The number of cocaine users also grew to 25 million in 2023, up from 17 million ten years earlier.

“Cocaine has become fashionable for the more affluent society,” UNODC chief researcher Angela Me said, noting a “vicious cycle” of increased use and production.

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While Colombia remains the key producer, cocaine traffickers are breaking into new markets across Asia and Africa, according to the report, with organized crime groups from the Western Balkans increasing their influence.

Captagon

“A new era of global instability has intensified challenges in addressing the world drug problem, empowering organised crime groups and pushing drug use to historically high levels,” UNODC noted.

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In 2023, six percent of the population aged between 15 and 64 are estimated to have used a drug, compared to 5.2 percent of the population in 2013. Cannabis remains the most widely used drug.

READ: Cocaine’s impact on the human body and PH polls

Seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants also reached a record high in 2023, making up almost half of all global seizures of synthetic drugs, followed by synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, UNODC said.

The fall of ruler Bashar al-Assad in Syria last December has “created uncertainty around the future of the captagon trade”, UNODC added.

Earlier this month, Syria said authorities had seized all production facilities of the illicit stimulant, which became Syria’s largest export under Assad.

“The latest seizure data from 2024 and 2025 confirm that captagon is continuing to flow — primarily to countries of the Arabian peninsula –- possibly indicating the release of previously-accumulated stockpiles or continued production in different locations,” UNODC said. /dl

A coca plantation is seen next to a house in Tibu, Colombia March 5, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Eduardo Ramirez/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab

VIENNA, June 26 (Reuters) – The global cocaine trade keeps setting new records, with cocaine the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market as Colombia production surges along with users in Europe and North and South America, a United Nations report published on Thursday said.

The annual U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) World Drug Report showed that in 2023, the latest year for which comprehensive data was available, the cocaine trade went from strength to strength.

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“Production, seizures, and use of cocaine all hit new highs in 2023, making cocaine the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market,” the Vienna-based UNODC said in a statement.

On the supply side, global estimated illegal production of cocaine rose by around a third to a record of more than 3,708 tons, mainly because of an increase in the area devoted to illicit coca bush cultivation in Colombia and updated data that showed the yield there was roughly 50% higher than in 2022.

The estimated number of cocaine users globally also kept growing, reaching 25 million people in 2023, up from 17 million 10 years earlier, the UNODC said.

“North America, Western and Central Europe and South America continue to constitute the largest markets for cocaine, on the basis of the number of people who used drugs in the past year and on data derived from wastewater analysis,” it said.

The synthetic drug market also continues to expand, helped by low operational costs and reduced risk of detection for those making or smuggling the drugs, the UNODC said.

The leading drugs there were amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) like methamphetamine and amphetamine.

“Seizures of ATS reached a record high in 2023 and accounted for almost half of all global seizures of synthetic drugs, followed by synthetic opioids, including fentanyl,” the UNODC said.

Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Leslie Adler

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Cocaine production, seizures, and use reached all-time highs in 2023, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) revealed in its latest world drug report published on Thursday.

UNODC warned that cocaine is the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market. Production skyrocketed to 3,708 tons in 2023 — a 340 percent increase from UNOC’s 2022 records. The drug, once largely confined to Latin America, is now spreading to Western Europe as criminal organizations from the Western Balkans increase their influence over the market.

The dramatic increase, UNODC explained in its key findings, is primarily due to an increase in the size of illicit coca bush cultivation areas in Colombia, the world’s top cocaine producer. Updated yield data measured by the U.N. agency found a 50-percent increase in coca bush in the country during 2023 when compared to 2022. Coca leaves are the main ingredient used to manufacture cocaine.

“The concentration of coca leaf production and manufacture of cocaine in high-yielding areas of Colombia also increased,” the report read. “By contrast, the area under coca leaf production in the Plurinational State of Bolivia stabilized in 2023, while the area of coca leaf production in Peru declined slightly.”

“Global cocaine seizures also reached a record high in 2023, and increases were reported in all regions. Over the period 2019–2023, there was a 68 per cent rise in the quantity of cocaine seized worldwide,” the report continued.

UNODC’s findings also revealed that the estimated global number of cocaine users grew from 17 million in 2013 to 25 million in 2023, with an increase in the prevalence of cocaine users among people aged between 15 and 64. The largest cocaine markets continue to be North America, Western and Central Europe, and South America according to the data.

“This edition of the World Drug Report shows that organized drug trafficking groups continue to adapt, exploit global crises, and target vulnerable populations,” UNODC Executive Director Ghada Waly said. “We must invest in prevention and address the root causes of the drug trade at every point of the illicit supply chain.”

“And we must strengthen responses by leveraging technology, strengthening cross-border cooperation, providing alternative livelihoods, and taking judicial action that targets key actors driving these networks,” Waly continued. “Through a comprehensive, coordinated approach we can dismantle criminal organizations, bolster global security, and protect our communities.”

The report found that, in addition to cocaine, the synthetic drug market continues to expand on a global level, largely driven by amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) such as methamphetamine and amphetamine including fentanyl — which is also known under the brand name “captagon.” ATS-related seizures reached record highs in 2023 and accounted for almost half of global synthetic drug seizures in that same year, followed by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

“The fall of the Assad regime in Syria has created uncertainty around the future of the captagon trade. Following the political transition, large captagon manufacturing sites in the country were uncovered,” UNODC said. “Though the discovery could possibly disrupt the drug’s supply, the latest seizure data from 2024 and 2025 confirm that captagon is continuing to flow — primarily to countries of the Arabian peninsula — possibly indicating the release of previously-accumulated stockpiles or continued production in different locations.”

Former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad presided over one of the world’s most prolific producers of captagon, a drug that became more prominent after being identified as the drug of choice during several jihadist atrocities, most recently the October 7 Hamas siege of Israel. Following the demise of the Assad regime in December, the Sunni jihadist groups that ousted him found a massive cache of captagon believed to have been in the regime’s control.

Colombian authorities have made extensive efforts for decades to eradicate cocaine production in the country, typically run by criminal organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) Marxist terrorist groups. In recent years, cocaine production in Colombia has dramatically increased during the administration of far-left and pro-cocaine President Gustavo Petro, who changed the country’s drug-fighting policies as part of his broader — and struggling — “total peace” program.

Petro has repeatedly called for the legalization of cocaine and, in February, claimed that the drug is only illegal because “it’s produced in Latin America.” According to Petro, cocaine is “not worse than whiskey” and could be “sold like wine” if it were legalized. The Colombian president himself is currently facing a preliminary inquiry launched this month by a Colombian Congressional commission investigating allegations that Petro himself suffers from drug addiction, made by former Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva.

Leyva, in a series of explosive public letters published between April and May, accused Petro of suffering from drug addiction problems based on circumstances that Leyva experienced throughout his tenure as Minister, and urged Petro to resign from the presidency.

According to Leyva, he was first able to “confirm” Petro’s substance abuse problems after Petro allegedly went missing for two days during one of his official visits to Paris, France. Throughout the letters, the former Foreign President also recounted other circumstances that, he claimed, serve as further evidence of Petro’s alleged addiction problems. Most notably, in one such incident involving Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping, Leyva said that Petro refused to speak to Xi during a lavish banquet reception during his official visit to China. The letters did not name the substances Petro was alleged to abuse.

Petro refuted Leyva’s accusations and instead accused his former top diplomat of allegedly conspiring with others to oust his government through meetings allegedly “organized” by Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL). Díaz-Balart responded to Petro’s accusations at the time by urging him to “seek professional help with [his] addiction problem.”

In July, the New York Times released a report indicating that Petro’s policies led to a dramatic surge in cocaine production to the point that large amounts of unsold coca paste are “piling up” in the country due to the increased supply of cocaine. The paste, obtained from harvested coca leaves, undergoes a chemical process that refines it into cocaine.

Petro’s government formally requested to the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in March that it remove coca leaves from its list of harmful substances on the grounds that the leaves would serve an industrial use in the manufacturing of fertilizers and beverages.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.