FBI Annual Internet Crime Report: Record Number of Cyber Crime Complaints in 2020, Business Email Compromise Hits Hardest Despite Rise in Ransomware and Phishing

By Scott Ikeda for CPO Magazine
Tuesday, March 23, 2021

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Targeting and total losses also generally track with state population size. California, Texas, Florida and New York were the top four for both total number of victims and total damages. These are also the four states with the highest average earnings per person.

While the report is a helpful reference, Ilia Kolochenko (CEO, Founder and Chief Architect at ImmuniWeb) points out that it is not a comprehensive view of all cyber crime that takes place each year: “The IC3 report mostly covers technology-driven fraud targeting individuals and organizations with modest in-house Incident Detection and Response (IDR) capacities. Moreover, the report includes only those incidents that were reported directly to the FBI’s IC3 center, not all cybercrimes or serious incidents being handled or investigated by the FBI. Many victimized organizations from regulated industries do not report security incidents to the IC3 specifically, let alone stealth incidents like SolarWinds that was undetected for a while and continues bringing new victims almost every day. Total losses from nation-state and other advanced hacking campaigns targeting US companies are probably hundreds of times higher than the adduced numbers, including lost profits and long-lasting losses caused by intellectual property theft, reputational damage and legal costs … What would be useful to have in the upcoming reports is the cybercrime clearance rate and factors that facilitate an investigation. Victimized people and future victims should be prepared to retain at least some basic digital evidence for examination and subsequent prosecution of the wrongdoers, otherwise, we will just continue speechlessly observing a cybercrime surge.” Read Full Article