It’s no surprise that the pandemic has significantly changed our lives. We’re social distancing with our peers and family, working from home, and our newest fashion accessory is our mask. Our virtual existence has altered the way we interact with others in a personal and professional manner.

Although we are all taking necessary precautions to keep ourselves and others safe from the spread of the virus, there is still another we have been exposed to now more than ever – cybercrime.

Since the pandemic, we have had no choice but to become more technology-dependent, making us extremely vulnerable as individuals and organizations to the world of cybercrime. Cybercrime includes everything from phishing to ransomware and more! The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released their annual Internet Crime Report for 2020, containing alarming statistics gathered by nearly 800,000 complaints of suspected cybercrimes. Not only does the report indicate that there was a 69% increase of complaints since 2019, but that losses exceeded over $4.2 billion! But that’s not all. Cybersecurity Ventures predict that cybercrime costs will increase by 15 percent annually over the next five years, reaching a frightening $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025.

No one is immune to cyberattacks and unfortunately some industries are more at risk than others. Industries that store confidential and valuable information result in being more vulnerable to cyberattacks by hackers than others. According to BlackFog, these industries were the most targeted by ransomware attacks in 2020:

  1. Government
  2. Manufacturing
  3. Services
  4. Education
  5. Healthcare

However, this doesn’t mean the small businesses should let there guard down. Less experienced hackers tend to come after “mom and pop shops” before attempting to target “head honcho” corporations.

Did you know web filtering is the first line of defense against web-based attacks? Netsweeper’s content filtering platform provides cost-effective and capable solutions to stops attackers from penetrating your network right at the gateway, preventing cyber-attacks and the loss of sensitive data. Protect your organization by blocking access to malicious content with Netsweeper’s additional layer of cybersecurity.

For more information and strategies, download our whitepaper to protect yourself and your organization from unwanted cyberattacks.

Don’t forget to check out our other blog posts related to cybercrime:

Submitted by: Natasha Pande