Cybercrime is increasingly complex – Here’s how data awareness can help – WEF
- The increasing sophistication of cybercrime, such as ransomware and AI-powered cyberattacks, brings substantial financial costs and disruptions to global businesses and economies.
- Personal data enables cybercrime, yet securing data remains a significant challenge for cyber leaders, who face competing priorities.
- Effective resilience and recovery practices, such as defining a minimum viable company (MVC) and modernizing infrastructure, are essential for minimizing business disruption and ensuring rapid recovery after a cyberattack.
The 2025 Global Cybersecurity Outlook (GCO) identifies several challenges facing security professionals and executives in addressing cyber risks. A major concern is the increasing sophistication and industrialization of cybercrime, which significantly impacts the global economy.
Ransomware is named by 45% of executives as the top cyber risk, followed by the rapid growth in cyber fraud (named by 20%). Beyond financial costs, the impacts on businesses and people are significant.
It seems a day cannot pass without news of another major data leak, often involving a major company. Data breaches have skyrocketed in the last decade, rising to 10,626 confirmed breaches in 2023 – double the number of breaches in 2022.
Cybercriminals’ increased interest in healthcare records is of particular concern. In 2024, more than 180 million healthcare records were breached in the US, affecting 53% of the population. According to reports, healthcare records are now considered 10 times more valuable than credit cards. Just consider the amount of verified personal data embedded within healthcare records – a crucial enabler of cybercrime.
How data underpins and fuels the evolution in cybercrime and fraud
Personal data acts as a critical enabler of cybercrime in three ways:
- Initial access: Threat actors use personal data and credentials from data leak sites for entry, often exploiting exposed infrastructure from legacy or shadow IT, sometimes originating from third-party sites.
- Lateral movement/privilege escalation: Adversaries target privileged users, using compromised data to escalate privileges. Criminals might seek specific data or financial access based on the account that has been compromised.
- Monetization: Criminals profit through data extortion, ransom payments and reselling compromised data. Sensitive or hard-to-acquire data can fetch higher pay-outs, especially where business disruption carries a wide-reaching societal impact.
Today’s cybercriminal tactics, techniques and procedures seem to confirm this trend. Historically, ransomware actors would seek a rapid move to payment by gaining network access, locking machines and demanding ransom. Nowadays, their choice of targets reflects the focus on data and deep network access to facilitate the pursuit of the most sensitive data, while simultaneously degrading the ability of organizations to recover as a means of forcing ransom payment.
Backups are targeted in 93% of ransomware attacks, while identity systems are targeted in more than 90% of cyber incidents – vital functions for both data acquisition and recovery.
Although data security is a hot topic, it is also a challenging topic for cyber leaders. First, it is competing with other priorities, such as coping with a rapidly expanding attack surface from new technology adoption. For example: only 37% of companies surveyed in this year’s GCO report have a process in place to assess the security of AI tools before implementation.
Second, even though data security, “crown jewel assessments” to identify an organization’s most important digital assets and data management are common topics in security, security leaders are not always directly accountable for data security. It’s frequently a responsibility that sits with other important business leaders.
Security focuses on protecting the infrastructure, networks and access methods supporting this data. Yet, the underlying target when attacking these areas – and frequently a pre-requisite to the success of the attack – is the data that allows those attacks to be monetized.
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Cybercrime is increasingly complex – Here’s how data awareness can help – WEF, source
