The FBI’s Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IC3) has released its annual 2022 Internet Crime and Cyber Attack Damage Report.
During the year, the FBI reportedly received more than 800,000 cybercrime-related complaints, with total losses in excess of $10 billion.
Let me remind you that we also wrote that FBI experts say that this year “sextortion” brought scammers more than $8 million, and also that the FBI and NSA release a statement about attacks by Russian hackers.
Also the media wrote that The FBI Said That Scammers Use Deepfakes to Get a Job.
IC3 began registering cybercrime complaints as early as 2000, and it took seven years for experts to reach the one million complaints per year mark. Since then, it has taken an average of 29.5 months for every additional million complaints.
This year it emerged that while the number of complaints was down compared to 2021, the loss to victims has increased from $6.9 billion to $10.3 billion. In general, over the past five years, law enforcement officers have received 3.26 million complaints, and the damage from the actions of hackers has exceeded $27.6 billion.
No less interesting is the fact that last year EAC and BEC scams (Email Account Compromise and Business Email Compromise) brought fraudsters $ 2.7 billion, but this type of crime for the first time in seven years gave way to investment fraud, on which the criminals earned $ 3.3 billion. In total, these types of crimes account for more than half of the losses recorded last year.
BEC scams and investment scams were the only crimes with losses in the billions, while other losses are in the millions.
In addition to BEC scam and investment fraud, the top five types of cybercrime in 2022 were phishing (300,000 complaints), personal data leakage (58,000 complaints), non-payment / non-delivery fraud (51,000 complaints), extortion (39,000 complaints) and technical support scam (32,000 complaints).
In terms of ransomware attacks, the FBI says it received more than 2,300 such complaints last year, with cumulative losses in excess of $34 million. More than 800 of these complaints came from organizations in the critical infrastructure sectors.
Most often (more than 100 incidents in each industry), the sectors of healthcare, critical production, government agencies and IT companies became victims of criminals. Critical infrastructure was most often attacked by LockBit, BlackCat, and Hive ransomware.
