FBI Issues Troubling Internet Crime Complaint Report

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center released its latest annual report and it’s not good news. It includes information from more than 790,000 complaints of suspected internet crime, a whopping 69% increase from 2019.

Reported losses exceeded $4.2 billion. The top three crimes reported by victims in 2020 were phishing scams, non-payment/non-delivery scam and extortion. Ransomware was also a significant factor.

Vanessa Pegueros is chief trust and security officer at OneLogin.

“Cybercriminals are masterful when it comes to playing on human emotions,” she said. “They take advantage of human loneliness, fears around health, and the desperate hopes of quick economic gain. Computers don’t have emotions and are the vehicles by which cybercriminals monetize these human emotions. We need to continue to implement security controls on computers because we will not change our humanness.”

Timothy Chiu is vice president of marketing at K2 Cyber Security.

“The FBI’s 2020 internet crime report shows a big jump in complaints about cyber crime,” he said. “During this last year, just like everyone else, cybercriminals were working from home. And with the shelter in place and quarantine, they were working harder than ever. Cybercriminals generally prefer attacks that are easy and will give them the biggest return. One way to ensure that is to take advantage of trending topics and news. Last year COVID-19 was the news, all the time and unavoidable, making it the obvious choice to use for scams, phishing and malware attacks, as evidenced by the FBI report.”