FBI: cybercriminals "earned" $ 2.7 billion in 2021

[Brother]

This week, experts from the FBI's Internet Fraud Complaints Center (IC3) released a report on Internet crime. According to law enforcement statistics, in 2021, 351,926 complaints were received (which is 14.3% more than in 2020), and the total losses of victims are estimated at 2.7 billion.

On average, experts received more than 900 complaints every day, and the most common problems in the past year were: business email compromise (BEC), personal data leaks, phishing in all its diversity, fraud through "romantic" dating, scams with non-payment and non-delivery of goods, as well as extortion.

It should be noted that, in general, the number of ransomware attacks dropped to the level of 2014, however, the company's losses due to such extortion have increased significantly, because criminals now carefully select victims and try to inflict as much damage as possible in order to receive a solid ransom.

IC3 experts call BEC attacks the most serious problem: over the past year, the victims lost $ 1.3 billion because of them.

As a rule, a BEC attack involves the compromise of a legitimate email account of one of the company's employees. The attackers then use the account to send fake emails from employees of the same company or its partners, and convince them to transfer funds to fake accounts under the guise of fake invoices and fictitious transactions.

However, BEC attacks can be carried out without compromising someone's mailbox. The same term also refers to fraudulent schemes in which criminals use common social engineering and the most simple tricks. For example, in the correspondence fraudsters pretend to be representatives of a partner company, by trick and deception forcing the employees of the victim company to pay a fake invoice or "accidentally" transfer funds to a fake account.

You can get an idea of how fast the number of BEC attacks is growing and how effective they are by looking at the statistics shown in the table below. Last year, company losses exceeded $ 1 billion for the first time, and IC3 analysts believe it will only get worse in 2022.