SINSIWAY | Database Security Specialist - PR

Global Cyber Crimes After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cyber crimes refer to all types of crimes taking place in cyberspace, including computer crimes and cyber terrors. Cyber crimes are increasing day by day with the expansion of ICT such as cloud, AI, and big data and the growing utilization of cyberspace during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: Cybersecurity Ventures

The market research service provider Statista predicted that the global cyber security market would grow with the raising awareness of cyber threats. In 2021, the global cyber security market size is estimated to be approximately USD 217.9 billion. With an annual average growth rate of 9.65%, the market size is expected to grow to USD 345.4 billion by 2026. The American cyber security research company Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that the size of global cyber crime damages will triple from USD 3 trillion in 2015 to USD 10.5 trillion in 2025.

Cyber Attack Damage Cases

Zoom meetings for video conferences, classes, etc., recorded more than 200 million daily users, thereby growing fast during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a phenomenon called “Zoombombing” has happened all over the world. Zoombombing refers to a phenomenon where uninvited participants join a meeting to cause disruption. An uninvited user joined a remote learning class of the University of Texas at Austin and made racist remarks. In Singapore, a hacker uploaded pornographic pictures during an online class of a middle school. Since users can access Zoom meetings only via a specific Internet address or a conference ID consisting of numbers, hackers are assumed to have accessed via any other routes. Data and personal information divulgence incidents have been continuously happening through cyber attacks. According to the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022 published by IBM Security, as a result of studying 550 organizations impacted by data breaches for one year, the total damage of data breaches was found to be USD 4.35 million, which was the highest for 17 years. From Facebook having 2.2 billion users all over the world, the personal information of 533 million users was divulged. The cause for the incident was found to be information divulgence resulting from web scraping. Web scraping is the technology of automatically extracting and collecting desired data from the database of a system or a website, which may be the start of hacking and infringement.

Types of Global Cyber Crimes

Ransomware

Ransomware is a compound word consisting of “ransom” and “software.” It is a type of malware that blocks access to a computer system or data and demands a ransom. In 2021, the number of ransomware attacks increased by 141.7% year on year. In February 2022, the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Internet & Security Agency issued a ransomware attack warning. As ransomware attacks are occurring often all over the world and the damages are gradually expanding as well. they are considered severe crimes.

Phishing

It was reported that phishing attacks increased by over 62% after the COVID-19 outbreak. Many attackers extort information by making people click on a malicious URL about COVID-19 or distributing malware. Starting from demanding money by impersonating a family member or an acquaintance, phishing techniques are evolving day by day, including making victims install a remote control application in their smartphones. It was found that over 85% of the victims are in their 40s or older. Middle-aged or older people should be more careful not to become phishing victims.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

A distributed denial of service attack, commonly abbreviated to a DDoS attack, is a cyber attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a server unavailable by exploding the traffic. It is a representative denial-of-service attack that causes failures in a specific server or a network by generating a large amount of data. Recently, DDoS attacks have been expanded to the IoT devices such as AI speakers, routers, and home appliances. According to the American market research service provider Market Research, the DDoS security market is expected to grow by 14% every year and its size is forecasted to reach USD billion by 2028, taking into consideration the current continuous growth in DDoS attacks since 2017.