Knowledge is power, and knowing about cybercrime helps us fight it. In this spirit, top security VPN IPVanish shares some 2014 statistics on cybercrime.
Popular 2014 Attacks
Whether people choose to believe it or not, cybercrime affects us all. Not all attacks are thefts. Sometimes it’s just a DDoS attacks that keeps you from accessing your email or other online account. Of course, this could mean missing an important notification that loses you a promotion or job offer or even an amazing sale. Moreover, not all thefts are as obvious as the credit card fraud that hits home, fast and undeniable. There are online account hacks that have us scrambling to change usernames and passwords, then we relax when nothing happens after a few weeks. But then no one can really tell what was gleaned from that compromised account, and what scams are launched from the information. What we do know is that every year about a billion US dollars is lost because of cybercrime.
To give us a better idea what cybercriminals are up to, IPVanish has shared some statistics about the types of cybercriminal attacks that have been popular so far this year. The most popular cybercriminal attack of 2014 is page defacement, which can harm mostly the website owners, or the website’s users. Defacement can simply aim to change the appearance of the site to cause trouble for the administrators. It can also upload malware for unsuspecting users to click on. Next is the DDoS attack. This also has a big effect on website and online service operators, and a minor effect on users, depending on how dependent they are on affected services. Malware is the third most popular attack, aimed at individual users but designed to harm more than just the one who gets infected. Malware is made to spread exponentially. Other popular attacks are DNS, PIN and account hijacking, WiFi hacks, targeted attacks, SQL injection, and NTP reflection.
Snapchat, Silk Road 2, PayPal, Ebay, and many other services were the victims of major attacks this year. These attacks compromised millions of users and robbed them of millions of dollars. And we haven’t even reached peak cybercrime season – Thanksgiving and Christmas.
