Cybersecurity is complex, and security professionals have to keep track of a vast array of tech trends, cybercrime rates, spending stats, and more to stay current. This article makes that task much more straightforward, putting all the critical cybersecurity statistics and significant events from 2019 to 2022 in one place.

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Cybersecurity Statistics for 2019

Cybercrime Trends

Security spending

Professional Trends

Major Incidents

Cybersecurity Statistics for 2020

Cybercrime Trends

Security Spending

Professional Trends

Major Incidents

Cybersecurity Statistics for 2021

Cybercrime Trends

Security Spending

Professional Trends

Major Incidents

Cybersecurity Statistics for 2022

Cybercrime Trends

Security Spending

Professional Trends

Major Incidents

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Cybersecurity Statistics for 2019

Cybercrime Trends

• Accenture found that security breaches rose 11% in 2019.
• RiskIQ research reported that global cybercrime costs 3M dollars a minute.  
• Proofpoint revealed that 88% of organizations around the world faced spear-phishing attacks in 2019. 86% of organizations faced business email compromise (BEC) attacks that year. 
• Accenture found that 80% of organizations are accelerating innovation initiatives to improve their cyber resilience, and 68% of business leaders believed cybersecurity risks were rising in 2019.
• Symantec reported that enterprise ransomware increased by 19% in 2018, but overall ransomware declined by 20%. Web attacks rose by 56%. 

Security spending

• Statista found that global cybersecurity spending reached nearly $41B in 2019.
• govinfo revealed the Department of Defence’s (DOD) reported cybersecurity budget was $8.5B in 2019, over 4% higher than it was in 2018. 

• Deloitte reported that companies spent an average of $2,337 per employee on cybersecurity in 2019.

Professional Trends

• Research and Markets estimated the global cybersecurity market size was nearly $150B in 2019. 

Major Incidents

• The MGM Grand resort in Las Vegas had at least 142M guest records compromised by cyberattackers in 2019. 
• The SamSam group struck multiple key organizations with ransomware attacks in 2018.

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Cybersecurity Statistics for 2020

Cybercrime Trends

• Statista revealed COVID increased the likelihood of a data breach for 64% of organizations globally. 
• Verizon reported that 45% of data breaches involved hacking, 22% involved social attacks, another 22% were connected to errors, 17% used malware, 8% were due to the bad internal actors, and 4% had a physical component.
• IBM reported that it took organizations an average of 207 days to find a breach in 2020.
• Varonis reported that 56% of Americans do not know what to do if their data is compromised in a breach and that 64% have never investigated to see if their data has been compromised in a breach.
• Verizon reported that social engineering attacks are connected to 69% of data breaches in public administration in 2020. They also discovered that phishing was used in 36% of breaches in 2020. 
• Bolster found fraud campaign activity grew by 185% in 2020, with nearly 7M new phishing and scam pages published online.
• RiskBased Security Research revealed that 36B records were compromised from January to September 2020, making it the worst year for data breaches to date.
• Verizon discovered that 86% of breaches were motivated by financial gain. This rate was over 70% higher than the previous year.
• Deep Instinct found that malware usage rose by 358% and ransomware increased by 435% in 2020.

Security Spending

• Gartner estimated global security spending was $120B in 2020. Almost $62B of that spending was security services, $16.5B was infrastructure protection, $13.4B was network security equipment, and $9.8B was identity access management spending.
• Deloitte found that organizations spent an average of $2,691 per employee on cybersecurity in 2020.

Professional Trends

• Grand View Research estimated that the global cyber security market reached $167B in 2020.

Major Incidents

• CNBC reported that the Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and many other celebrities had been compromised. 
• Marriott announced that a recent breach had impacted over 3M customers, exposing details such as contact information, loyalty account information, and more.
• CISA, ACSC, the NCSC, and the FBI reported that CVE-2019-19781, CVE-2019-11510, and CVE-2018-13379 were among the most exploited VPN vulnerabilities of 2020. 
• SolarWinds was hacked in an effort backed by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, exposing the data of thousands of organizations. 

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Cybersecurity Statistics for 2021

Cybercrime Trends

• IBM reported that the average cost of a data breach in the US was $9.05M in 2021 — higher than any other country on earth. 
• PurpleSec revealed that cybercrime jumped by 600% during the pandemic. 
• IBM reported that it took organizations an average of 212 days to find a breach in 2021.
• Netscout reported 5.4M DDoS attacks in the first half of 2021. 
• Dragos found organizations lacked operation technology (OT) network visibility in 86% of their 2021 service engagements. 

Security Spending

• Gartner projected global security and risk management spending to hit $150B in 2021. 
• McKinsey reported that 70% of security leaders felt they would face budgets cutbacks for the fiscal year of 2021.
• Accenture reported that 82% of organizations expanded their cybersecurity spending in 2021. 

Professional Trends

• (ISC)² calculated that the total number of cybersecurity professionals worldwide was 4.19M in 2021. They also estimated that the world needs 65% more cybersecurity professionals to defend critical assets adequately. 

Major Incidents

• Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack causes fuel shortages in multiple states.
• Kaseya suffered a ransomware attack, and the hackers demanded $70M — the highest known ransomware fee. 
• Financial services firms in the US and Russia were hit with the largest recorded volumetric DDoS attacks. 
• The Log4j vulnerability compromises the security of hundreds of millions of devices.

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Cybersecurity Statistics for 2022

Cybercrime Trends

• Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that cybercrime will incur $10T in costs globally by 2025. 
• Cisco projects that the total number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks will reach 15.4M by 2023.

• Juniper Research forecasts ad fraud will cause $100B in losses by 2023. 
• Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that ransomware attacks will occur at the rate of one every two seconds by 2031.
• The World Economic Forum’s 2022 global cybersecurity survey listed ransomware as the number one cyber threat. 

Security Spending

• Brand Essence Research projects that the global cybersecurity market will reach a valuation of $403B by 2027.
• Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that total global cybersecurity spending from 2021 to 2025 will hit $1.75T.

Professional Trends

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the information security analyst job market will grow by 33% from 2020 to 2030.
• Cybersecurity Ventures forecasts that there will be 3.5M cybersecurity job openings in 2025.

Major Incidents

• News Corp — owner of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and more — announced in February of 2022 that attackers had compromised its systems. 
• Octa is hacked by the Lapsus$ group, exposing data on 2.5% of the security company’s customers. 

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