We Don’t Talk Enough About Cybercrime

Cybercrime has absolutely exploded in recent years. (WSJ)

The latest: A China-linked hacking group breached U.S. broadband providers, including AT&T and Verizon, gaining potential access to wiretap systems used for court-ordered surveillance, The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend.

• The breach, which was carried out by a group called Salt Typhoon, may have lasted for months or longer before being discovered.

• A previous campaign, Flax Typhoon, infiltrated over 200,000 routers, cameras, and other devices in the U.S.

Also troubling: A new analysis from BT found that over the past year, the telecoms company has seen a 1,200% increase in malicious scanning bots attempting to access systems.

• BT says it experiences 2,000 potential cyber-attack signals every second across its networks.

Zoom out: Globally, the number of data breach victims has risen from 6 per hour in 2001 to 97 per hour in 2021, a 1517% increase over 20 years.

• The U.S. accounted for 46% of global cyber attacks between July 2020 and June 2021, according to a report from AAG, an IT services company.

• Half of American internet users had their accounts breached in 2021.

• That same year, cyber-related crimes cost Americans $6.9 billion.

Bubba’s Two Cents

A friend and attorney (that’s argued before the Supreme Court, for what it’s worth) noted to me that because the internet was designed to be borderless, we’ve basically created an environment where there is no good way to police or stop cyber pirates. The decentralized nature of of the internet plus its global reach and facilitation of information sharing was supposed to be a boon to society, meanwhile crime was an afterthought. A few short decades later, the cat is now out of the bag.