During the past 40 years, hackers have graduated from worm attacks in the 1980s to fully funded organizations tapping into some of the most lucrative industries in the world. Today, cybercrime is a significant threat to any company with a device attached to the internet and continues to cause substantial economic impact worldwide.

The modern-day cyberattack can trace its roots back to the 1988 Morris worm attack. Before the World Wide Web had made an impact, a small program launched from a computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) propagated remarkably. It infected an estimated 6,000 of the approximately 60,000 computers connected to the internet at the time. Although it was difficult to calculate the exact damage caused by the Morris worm, estimates put it anywhere between US$100,000 and the millions.

Over the decades, cybercrime has become more sophisticated, with threats reflecting geopolitical tensions and hackers gaining notoriety. In 1999, a teenager hacked into the DoD and NASA and installed backdoor access to servers to download $1.7 million in software. Fast-forward to 2021, and the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S. was subject to a ransomware attack that forced the company to shut the pipeline down and pay $4.4 million via Bitcoin. In 2023, the CIOp gang exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer software that affected 2,000 organizations and an estimated 62 million people.

Economic Scale of Cybercrime

The United States, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $25.44 trillion at the end of 2022, is by far the world’s largest economy. China followed in second place, with a GDP of $17.96 trillion. However, cybercrime is growing at a remarkable rate. In 2021, it caused global damages that cost $6 trillion — approximately $2 trillion more than the GDP of Japan — the country with the world’s third-largest economy.

According to Evolve Security, cybercrime will grow by 15% annually over the next five years. Estimates from Statista’s cybersecurity outlook see the annual global cost of cybercrime rising to nearly $24 trillion by 2027, compared to $8.4 trillion in 2022.

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