Clearly, it’s important to cast a wide net when estimating the costs of cybercrime, notes a Barracuda blog post by Tony Burgess, a twenty-year veteran of the IT security industry. As reported in a 2025 Cybercrime Magazine article:

“Cybercrime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, reputational harm, legal costs, and potentially, regulatory fines, plus other factors,” said Steve Morgan, founder of Cybersecurity Ventures.

In the same article, it is predicted that the global cost of cybercrime for that year will amount to $10.5 trillion — a dramatic rise from their 2020 estimate of $1 trillion. But looking ahead to 2031, the magazine predicts that number will rise to just $12.2 trillion, based on a steady increase of 2.5 percent per year. That assumption is based on the idea that the cybercrime economy is getting so big and so profitable that its growth rate, which in the past has increased steadily, will plateau soon if it hasn’t already.

One point to consider, according to Morgan, is that over the past decade since Cybersecurity Ventures has been tracking cybercrime costs, the damages from some legacy threats, for instance computer viruses, have gone down while next generation threats such as deepfakes and other AI-powered attacks have risen sharply.

What about some estimates that Cybercrime could cost the world more than $23 trillion by 2027? “There are various sources, media outlets and vendors, who previously cited our cybercrime cost predictions and then continued to project a 15 percent year-over-year growth rate to come up with over-inflated figures that aren’t sustainable,” Morgan recently added.

So, what’s the bottom line? Regardless of the actual numbers, there is no doubt that cybercrime imposes massive costs on the world’s economy, according to Burgess, and those costs are rising.

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