Falling Victim to Internet Attack Only Takes a Minute, Report Finds

Every minute on the internet brings thousands of cyber attacks and staggering financial losses, according to a new report from cybersecurity company RiskIQ.

Tapping into proprietary and third-party research to analyze the ever-increasing volume of malicious activity on the internet, RiskIQ’s “Evil Internet Minute” examines the cyber threats facing internet users and breaks down, by the minute, the cost and regularity of cyber attacks.

The data shows that, in a single minute on the internet, 1,861 people fall victim to some sort of cyber attack, and $1,138,888 is lost to cybercrime. Despite the fact that businesses spend up to $171,233 a minute on information security, their digital assets continue to suffer attacks on a massive scale—enduring strikes from malware, malvertising, phishing efforts, and other cyber threats. Every 60 seconds, 1.5 organizations fall victim to ransomware at an average cost of $15,221. In addition, each minute on the internet brings 1,274 new variants of malware, 22.9 phishing email attacks, and 5,518 records leaked in publicly disclosed incidents.

The report reveals that these incidents of cyber attack, which have gotten worse since last year, cost businesses $600 billion each year, with ransomware in particular draining $8 billion per year—more than $15,000 per minute.

In addition, the data shows that each minute generated 0.17 blacklisted mobile apps, 0.21 new phishing domains, 9.2 malvertising incidents, 0.07 incidents of the Magecart credit card skimmer, 0.1 new sites running the CoinHive cryptocurrency mining script, and four potentially vulnerable web components.

According to RiskIQ, “When brands understand what they look like from the outside-in, they can begin developing a digital threat management strategy that allows them to discover everything associated with their organization on the internet, both legitimate and malicious, and monitor it for potentially devastating cyber attacks. However, bringing the massive scope of an organization’s attack surface into focus is no easy task.”