Cybersecurity company Surfshark recently conducted a study of the top ten countries found to have the most cybercrime. According to the amassed data, the U.K. tops the list, followed by the US, Canada, and Belgium. This is another poor statistic for Johnson’s Britain.
What was particularly apparent, in terms of concerning cybersecurity statistics, was the U.K. being found to have 3,409 victims per 1 million Internet users. This is not only very high globally, it is almost twice as many as the U.S. (which stands at 1,724 per 1 million online users).
Another finding that does not paste the U.K.in a good light on the technology front is with the number of victims. In the U.K. the levels of cybercrime victims grew by 130 percent compared to 2019.
This represents the second-highest year-on-year growth worldwide after South Africa. The African country faced the sharpest rise in people falling foul of nefarious Internet crime, at 277 percent.
In terms of the main forms that these attacks are taking, phishing continues to be the most common cybercrime (this was also the case in 2020). Following this, confidence and romance fraud are also alarmingly high, and these types of crimes recorded the highest financial impact in total on its victims.
- Apache Log4j vulnerabilities.
- Malware volume.
- New variants of malware.
- Encrypted threats.
- Phishing.
- Cryptojacking.
- Internet of Things specific malware.
- Date breach.
- Cyber-extortion.
- Ransomware.
Commenting on these trends for Digital Journal is Vytautas Kaziukonis the CEO of Surfshark.
Kaziukonis’s assessment of the trends is: “As more of our lives become digital, the chances of falling victim to online crimes grow every year. Since 2001, the online crime victim count increased by 15 times, and financial losses grew more than 200 times, from $2,000 to $480,000 per hour.” We can also expect change, says Kaziukonis (and not for the better): “Inevitably, the privacy and cybersecurity landscape will change rapidly over the next several years. Now is a good time to focus on personal cybersecurity hygiene to stay safer online.”
