Global cybercrime costs growing 12x faster than cybersecurity spending

Companies and organizations spend billions of dollars on cybersecurity spending each year to prevent their businesses from losing sensitive data and head-spinning figures. But despite all the efforts, the annual cybercrime cost has snowballed and remains gigantic compared to total cybersecurity spending.

According to data presented by Stocklytics.com, the global cybercrime cost has grown 12 times faster than total cybersecurity spending in the past six years.

According to the Allianz Risk Barometer survey, despite the maximum efforts to prevent and minimize cybercrime damage, cyber-attacks are still the biggest threat in the business sector, ahead of inflation, energy crises, and supply chain disruptions. This fear is quite understandable for several reasons. Firstly, the annual cybercrime cost has snowballed over the years, rising by an average of one trillion dollars annually since 2020. But even more worrying is that the annual cybercrime cost has grown much faster than total cybersecurity spending.

According to Statista Market Insights, in 2018, companies and organizations worldwide spent $102.7 billion on cybersecurity measures. Two years later, this figure jumped to over $150 billion. Statista expects the annual spending on cybersecurity solutions and services to hit $183 billion this year, or 78% more than the figure reported six years ago.

The global cybercrime cost has grown much more than that in this period. According to Statista, cyber attacks, including ransomware, data breaches, cyber espionage, and phishing, will inflict damages totalling $9.2 trillion in 2024, $1.1 trillion more than last year, and a shocking 972% more than six years ago. This cost includes stolen money, damage and destruction of data, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal or financial data, post-attack disruption to the ordinary course of business, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.

Though tens of thousands of companies and organizations worldwide have already boosted their cybersecurity budgets, their total spending on cybersecurity services and solutions is still just a drop in the ocean compared to the total cost of cybercrime.

Statista expects global cybersecurity spending to jump by 10% year-over-year to an all-time high of $202 billion in 2025. This is still 50 times less than the expected annual cybercrime cost of almost $10.3 trillion, more than double the GDP of some of the world’s largest economies like Japan, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, this represents a huge increase compared to 2018 figures, when the cybercrime cost was only eight times higher than total cybersecurity spending.

Statista expects the gap between the total money on cybersecurity spending and the damage caused by cyber-attacks to remain the same in the following years. By 2028, cybercrime will cost businesses a shocking $13.8 trillion, or 49% more than this year. The cybersecurity market will see practically identical growth, with total spending growing by 50% to $273 billion in the next four years.