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Nigeria, others to share in cybercrime cost of $12tr

As a result of the recent shift in growing economies, such as Nigeria and other African countries, South Asia (namely India) and Oceania will have the highest attacks by cyber criminals even as the latest report from Computer Crime Research Center (CCRC) has projected that the cost of cybercrime will rise to $12 trillion by 2025.

The firm projected that Cyber Extortion will remain prevalent, with a 30-50per cent increase, and affecting in the majority of cases corporations, SMBs, and government entities.

The CCRC report noted that aside from external market figures, the projection is also based on other cybersecurity research by CheckPoint and Orange Cyderdefense, which noted consistent growth in cyberattacks and ransomware in the past year.

Notably, the cost of cybercrime is feared to surge on the back of a rise in attacks enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and a 910per cent increase in monthly registrations for domains, both benign and malicious, related to ChatGPT, specifically in an attempt to mimic ChatGPT.

Highlighting the role of AI in the surging cybercrime market, the CCRC said:  “In particular, the threat landscape surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expanding aggressively where attackers use sophisticated linguistic techniques, including increased text volume, punctuation, and sentence length. The trend suggests that generative AI allows threat actors to craft sophisticated and targeted attacks at speed and scale.

“And as we move forward in 2024 and 2025 the market will see threat actors adopting AI to expand every aspect of their offensive toolkit. AI will be adopted to deliver more cost-efficient, rapid development of new malware and ransomware variants.

“Deepfake technologies will take phishing and impersonation attacks to a new level. Businesses will embrace AI but will be threatened by its use in novel cyberattacks. There is also a risk that the dynamic character of AI-driven attacks could make static defense mechanisms ineffective.”

The report noted that the number of key events last year about cyber threats has been overwhelming and versatile in terms of impact on an organization or government body.

It added that even though cybersecurity is now a board-level issue, there needs to be greater involvement at the executive board level by driving cybersecurity risk governance and steering committees to help minimize the risks imposed on the company or government entity.

 “Vertical segments covering manufacturing, retail, professional services, financial, and utilities will be the most vulnerable. This is partly driven by vulnerabilities across the legacy nature of their network, technology maturity, and elevated risk impact levels to the business as a result of cyber-attacks.

“Hacktivism is rated high moving forward in 2024, where threat actors will continue to target either corporations or government bodies politically supporting certain entities. Predominately, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) continues to be utilized due to the high impact on business continuity,” it said.

CCRC was created in 2001 to conduct research in criminal and criminological problems of cybercrime to render scientific and methodical aid and consulting. The CCRC accumulates experience and performs analysis of the results of scientific-practical research in counteracting and preventing computer crimes.