Cybercrime has cost the world’s economies $6 million


Cybercrime has cost more than 6 trillion dollars to the world economyassured this Tuesday Alessandro Profumo, executive director of the Italian giant of aeronautics and defense Leonardo.

“The new threats registered in the field of cyber security in the last two years are the “collateral damage” caused by the Covid-19 epidemic and the acceleration of digitization,” Profumo explained at the opening in Rome of a congress of experts on Cybertech Europe 2022 and the war in Ukraine.

“Cyber ​​attacks are becoming more numerous, sophisticated and impactful. In 2021, the total cost of cybercrime exceeded $6 trillion. A fifth of those attacks were directed against Europe,” Profumo said, citing figures from the Italian Association for Computer Security (Clusit), taken from a report by the US think tank Cybersecurity Ventures.

Cybersecurity has become a key issue for the European Commission and for the members of the European Union (EU) in order to guarantee the “digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy“, he added.

But the need for specialists in this field is enormous and “55% of European companies have problems recruiting staff, since there is a lack of at least 200,000 experts,” he said.

In addition to the lack of experts there is also little coordination. “Our incident reporting system (IT) does not work” because it is “too cumbersome, too bureaucratic,” Juhan Lepassaar, executive director of the EU Cybersecurity Agency (Enisa), acknowledged two weeks ago, quoted by Euractiv, a site of information dedicated to European affairs.

Cybersecurity problems have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. “We have noticed increased pressure” since the war began, Profumo, whose group has a branch specializing in cybersecurity, with clients around the world, said recently.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned last month that “the war in Ukraine has raised serious concerns for IT operations.”

“Attacks could target financial institutions with important IT systems. If successful, such attacks could lead to a loss of confidence in the financial system, with a negative impact on global financial stability,” the IMF said.



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