Ransomware Losses Top $1.5M Each Minute

A new report has found that 1.5 organizations fall victim to ransomware attacks every minute — and more than $1 million is lost each minute due to cybercrime.

RiskIQ’s 2018 “The Evil Internet Minute” investigated the cyber threats that organizations and internet users face every minute.

“With businesses expanding their online presence to create more touchpoints with customers, employees and partners, the boundaries between what’s inside the firewall and what’s outside become less and less discernible, opening a whole new front in the battle between attackers and security teams,” the company wrote in a blog post. “These attackers target brands and consumers on the open web with tactics like phishing, spinning up malicious mobile apps, hacking third-party suppliers and directly compromising websites.”

The report found that cybercrime costs businesses $600 billion each year, with ransomware specifically costing corporations $8 billion per year, or more than $15,000 per minute.

In addition, there are 1,274 new malware variants released each minute, 22.9 phishing email attacks per minute and 2.9 billion record leaks from publicly disclosed incidents each day (that’s more than 5,000 each minute). The data also showed .17 blacklisted mobile apps, .21 new phishing domains, .07 incidents of the Magecart credit card skimmer, .1 new sites running the CoinHive cryptocurrency mining script and four potentially vulnerable web components discovered during the evaluation process.

“This data shows that as organizations continue to roll out new digital strategies and initiatives, the new digital assets they create are subject to scores of malware, malvertising, phishing and crypto mining efforts on a massive scale, while rogue apps, domain and brand infringement, and social impersonation cause business disruption and material loss,” according to RiskIQ.

The company noted that the instances of these cybercrimes have gotten worse since last year, showing that companies need to do more to protect themselves and their clients.

“When brands understand what they look like from the outside-in, they can begin developing a digital threat management strategy that allows them to discover everything associated with their organization on the internet, both legitimate and malicious, and monitor it for potentially devastating cyberattacks. However, bringing the massive scope of an organization’s attack surface into focus is no easy task,” the company added.