5 Cyber security facts and stats

Cyber security facts and stats

Did you know that every 39 seconds there is a hacker attack worldwide, according to a recent school study by the University of Maryland. This is due to unsecure user names and passwords being created or changed, which gives hackers more of a chance to gain access to confidential, personal and company information. This is especially more of an issue with the recent rise in persons working from home or outside of company premises, affecting 1 in 3 every year.

Earlier this year Captec put a great deal of effort into attaining the Cyber Essentials Plus certification to improve cyber security and help prevent security breaches. We consider this to be an essential minimum standard for companies to attain.

Here’s some other interesting facts about hacks and threats…

• Since COVID-19, there was a 300% increase reported in cybercrimes. This was due to some office working transferring to home working, with it all being a new and unusual situation, hackers leveraged the opportunities of the adjustments needed to ensure a secure working environment for all organisations/company’s throughout the pandemic and moving forward into this new way of working life. As of summer 2020, 12,377 covid related scams alone were recorded. (US FBI)
• By 2025, the expected rate of connections to IoT devices will reach around 75 billion. The number of connections was due to reach 31 billion in 2020 alone, so cyber security has never been a more important market sector to have more knowledge within. (Cybint)
• Data breaches in 2021 have soared past the recorded numbers in 2020. The number of breaches that were publicly reported so far in 2021, have already exceeded the total for 2020, putting this year on track for a record high year so far. President and CEO of the ITRC has commented “2021 is just 238 breaches away from tying the record for a single year. It’s also interesting to note that the 1,111 data breaches that the amount and quality of data being exfiltrated by hackers. From cyber-attacks so far, this year exceeds the total number of data compromises from all causes in 2020.”
• According to an article Cyber Magazine published, IoT devices suffer an average of 5,200 cyber-attacks every month. This is due to these devices storing, transmitting and processing so much data every day, they unfortunately make a perfect target for cyber criminals.

Understanding cyber security is very important more now than ever, as eventually in the years to come, cybercrime could become the greatest threat to every person, place and company in the world. This is due to ever evolving technology and more people using online based applications for storage, working, and keeping in touch that is business and/or personal related.