On May 14, the FBI marked a sobering milestone: the receipt of its six millionth digital crime complaint. It took just 14 months for the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to reach its new threshold. Digital crime complaints are on the rise, and we have some ideas as to why. Check out what these statistics mean, where social engineering fits in and how you can protect your business or agency from cyber attacks.
Social Engineering Leads the Pack
Short answer: it took off. The FBI found that digital crime complaints increased by about 70% between 2019 and 2020. Many of those complaints involved some form of social engineering. Phishing attacks, non-payment or non-delivery ploys and extortion scams were the most prevalent types of ruses, with romance and confidence schemes, investment fraud attempts and business email compromise (BEC) campaigns costing their victims the most. The last method of attack accounted for $1.8 billion over the course of 2020, according to the IC3.
The FBI wasn’t the only group that observed an increase in the number of attacks like this in recent years. In its 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, for instance, Verizon Enterprise found that social engineering was the most common attack vector in data breaches observed in 2020 and the third most common attack vector for that year. The firm also observed that most attacks (85%) involved atte ..
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