Crime has also moved online, and cyber-enabled financial crimes, such as business email compromise, CEO fraud (where cybercriminals impersonate executives), e-commerce scams and investment fraud, have escalated in nearly every region. Today’s ransomware attacks target ‘big game’ targets, including major corporations, governments and critical infrastructure. To maximize harm and illicit profit, strategies have shifted to techniques like double extortion, where victims’ data or files are both encrypted and threatened with public exposure, compounding the risks of business disruption and reputational damage.
While world governments have their hands full dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, shady cyber heist operators are busy working the other way creating a vast fortune, to the tune of $6 trillion by 2021 end alone.
If that total amount is a country’s GDP, it’s next only to the income of the US and China as all of us know India is at $3 trillion mark and planning to touch $5 trillion in next 5 years after crossing the economic indicators of Britain.
Technology keeps evolving at a rapid pace, so do cybercrooks. Apart from newer forms of cyber threats, even the oldest tricks in the book are not completely useless for these cybercriminals. They take these tricks out of the box and make modifications and updates to bypass security measures especially created for them.
Truth Labs has performed a number of forensic investigations of financial fraud and accounting for public sector and corporate clients.
