According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime damage costs are predicted to exceed $10 trillion USD in 2025, making it the world’s third largest economy after the U.S. and China.
One-in-five Canadian businesses have been targeted, and one-in-seven have lost money to payment fraud in the last six months, according to a report by Payments Canada. In a recent TransUnion survey, Canadian business leaders reported fraud losses equivalent to 7.2 percent of their revenues this year—totalling an estimated $111 billion CAD in the past year.
Part of the reason why those losses are so high, according to Adam Evans, Royal Bank of Canada’s senior vice president and Chief Information Security Officer, is that businesses too often underestimate the risks, and too often under-invest in protecting themselves.
“We refer to it as the ‘cyber poverty line’,” he said. “The criminal ecosystem of this industrialized complex is outpacing businesses, so companies are falling below that poverty line, and when you fall below it, the chances of you getting compromised have increased pretty drastically.”
The unfortunate reality is that for most Canadian businesses, being the target of a cybercrime—like fraud, ransomware attacks or identity theft—is less a matter of “if,” and more a matter of “when.”
While we all hope for the best, Evans says it’s critical for businesses to take the time to create and communicate a plan for the worst.