Cybercrime Expected To Cost Businesses More Than $2 Trillion by 2019, Juniper Says

The rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, said a Juniper Research news release Tuesday. The industry researcher said most data breaches will come from existing IT and network infrastructure, and threats targeting mobile devices and the IoT are being reported “at an increasing rate.” The report said cybercrime is increasingly becoming professional with the emergence of cybercrime products like malware creation software, and while the number of attacks overall may decrease, there will be more successful hacks. “We aren’t seeing much dangerous mobile or IoT malware because it’s not profitable,” said report author James Moar. “The kind of threats we will see on these devices will be either ransomware, with consumers’ devices locked down until they pay the hackers to use their devices, or as part of botnets, where processing power is harnessed as part of a more lucrative hack,” Moar said. “With the absence of a direct payout from IoT hacks, there is little motive for criminals to develop the required tools.” Juniper said 60 percent of anticipated data breaches in 2015 will occur in North America, “but this proportion will decrease over time as other countries become both richer and more digitized.”