Cybercrime

A further breakdown of the overall figures shows that, in all, the actual cost hinges on a number of variables. The factors that enter heavily into the equation include attack types and their frequency, along with the organization’s size and even the country in which an organization is based.

This hack is said to be reminiscent of a particularly brazen bank cyber-heist from February 2016, in which hackers successfully pilfered $81 million from the account of the central bank of Bangladesh at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

According to US authorities, the enterprise aimed at becoming the premier destination for the buying and selling of stolen payment card data and forged identification documents. It is believed that the losses that the Infraud Organization had intended to cause were north of $2.2 billion.

A poorly-secured password reset utility allowed a man to access more than 1,000 email accounts at a New York City-area university in a hunt for sexually explicit photographs and videos.

US authorities have charged a 28-year-old Ohio man who is alleged to have created and installed creepy spyware on thousands of computers for 13 years.

Bitcoin, the progenitor of the entire cryptocurrency boom and still the most popular virtual currency, experienced a truly heady run-up in value. Its price surge was punctuated with a crescendo midway through December, when a single bitcoin approached $20,000.

A US judge has sentenced a Nigerian man to three years and five months in a federal prison after he pleaded guilty to taking part in a business email compromise scam that targeted organisations around the world.

The association expects the increased costs incurred in security breaches to come both from traditional areas, such as network cleanup and customer notification, and newer areas such as litigation.

Clarksons, the global shipping firm, has turned the tables on criminal hackers who attempted to extort a ransom payment after stealing confidential information from the company's network.