Impact of Covid-19 on cybercrime and cyberfraud

The arrival of Covid-19 into our world last year has meant that the development of digital technologies across a multitude of sectors has vastly accelerated. We can see this especially in the financial sector with a sharp increase in digital account openings and mobile banking adoption.

The rapid adoption of digital banking, especially over mobile devices has resulted in a rise in cyberfraud in the financial sector.

In today’s digital-first world, there is now mounting pressure for enterprises and governments to combat the increasing threat posed by cyber-criminals. With cybercrime costing the global economy more than $1 trillion last year, Steve Grobman, CTO of McAfee comments that “the severity and frequency of cyberattacks on businesses continues to rise as techniques evolve and new technologies broaden the threat surface”.

The impact of cybercrime is projected to hit $6 trillion annually by 2022 according to Cybersecurity Ventures. To give you an insight into how the global pandemic has impacted cyber fraud, we can cite cyber-observer.com as they highlight a number of worrying statistics on this topic:

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• 400% increase in SIM-Swap fraud in the previous 5 years. (Which Magazine)
• $133.7 billion. This is the expected Worldwide spending on cybersecurity in 2022. (Gartner)
• 31% increase in cyber scams reported by UK businesses in 2020.
• 68% of business leaders feel their cybersecurity risks are increasing. (Gartner)
• 71% of all data breaches were financially motivated. (RiskBased)
• 52% of breaches featured hacking, 28% involved malware and 32–33% included phishing or social engineering, respectively. (Verizon)

Phonovation’s innovative fintech solution actively bridges the gap between a seamless user experience and potential security risks. We achieve this by providing an API into the physical mobile network to help banks monitor their customer’s mobile identity in real time.