What motivates cybercriminals to engage in cybercrime?
Cybersecurity is not just a buzzword in our day to day society. Ever since digital assets have surpassed in value the physical assets, criminals have shifted their attention to where the money is. Let’s just remember the fact that over 90% of the world’s resources are digital. Cybercrime is part of our life, whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Why do people engage in cyber-criminal activities? Scientist have analyzed the reasoning behind it and came up with a great formula to explain why we have people engaging in cybercrime.
These reasons are: personal gain, low obedience level, success, penalty.Thus they created this formula to quantify the incentive to create cybercrime, called ICC which stands for Incentive to Create Cybercrime.
Success, the thing we live for in today’s society. We want to be successful in life, in our carrier, in our love life, in our family life, in basically everything we do. Guess what? So do the cybercriminals. Believe it or not, they are very successful. Let’s just crunch the numbers a bit. In 2016 in the US alone, more than 20 Billion Dollars were lost due to the different forms of identity theft and more than 110 Billion Dollars were lost globally due to different forms of cyberattacks. That means that $3,488 are lost every second. So yes, being proficient in cybercrime actually pays off pretty well. Besides identity theft, ransomware is one of the most popular cybercrime activities out there.
Basically, you get infected with a virus, by email, through an exploit, by a drive-by download and they manage to have access to your computer and your data on that computer. Once activated, ransomware starts encrypting all the data on the computer with strong encryption and the only way you can get access to that data is by having the encryption key, which they have. You get notified that your data is taken hostage and you need to pay a certain amount of crypto-currency though a specific process within a set amount of time, usually 48 to 72 hours to get that encryption key or else your data will be forever lost. And it works as more than 50% of the victims pay to get their data back. Some get the encryption key, some do not and lose their money in the process as well.
Paying ransom is never a good thing as it proliferates the criminal activity. Unfortunately, many victims do not safeguard their data, they do not have proper backups and they are put in a position where they do not have much of a choice other to pay up. Ransomware grew like no other crime in history, from 2015 to 2016, there was an increase of 6000% in ransomware activity. Last year alone, over 1 Billion Dollars were attributed to damages caused by Ransomware and it is estimated that this year, it will hit around 4 billion dollars. Have no doubts that ransomware is a very lucrative “business”. It has become so popular that there are specific groups on the deep web who offer it as a service for anyone who wants to make an extra buck. Anyone can start a ransomware criminal operation today with no investments and become a cybercriminal. They even offer 24/7/365 support on the platform.
For the hardworking, tax paying citizen, engaging in such activities is not worth the risk of losing everything and going to jail. For others who have very little to lose or who think they will never get caught, such offers are very attractive. That is why cybercrime is the highest it has ever been.
About the author:
Ioan Hipp is not a mathematical genius, he is not a world renowned expert or a prominent figure in the cybersecurity industry. He is just a passionate person on the new cyber world that our IoT is developing into, a storyteller and a contributor to a better society.