FBI: Losses to Cybercrime Increased by 49% in 2022 to $10.3 Billion
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has published its 2022 Internet Crime Report, which shows at least $10.3 billion was lost to cybercrime in 2022, up 49% ($3.4 billion) from 2021, despite a 5% reduction in complaints (800,944). Over the past 5 years, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has received reports of losses of more than $27.6 billion across 3.26 million complaints to IC3.
FBI data show a 36% year-over-year decrease in ransomware attacks, which fell from 3,729 complaints in 2021 to 2,385 complaints in 2022. Despite this decrease, the FBI says ransomware still poses a significant threat, especially to the healthcare sector which ranked top out of 16 critical infrastructure sectors for ransomware attacks in 2022 and actually saw an increase in complaints. 210 ransomware complaints were filed with IC3 in 2022 by healthcare organizations compared to 148 in 2021. The FBI has observed an increase in double extortion tactics in ransomware attacks, where data are stolen in addition to file encryption and payment is required to obtain the decryption keys and to prevent the publication or sale of stolen data. LockBit was the most prolific ransomware actor with 149 reported attacks, ALPHV/BlackCat was second with 114 attacks, and Hive was 3rd with 87 attacks.
Several cybercriminal groups that have historically used ransomware in their attacks have switched to extortion-only attacks, involving data theft and ransom demands but no file encryption. The FBI’s data shows extortion attacks have remained flat, increasing only slightly from 39,360 complaints in 2021 to 39,416 complaints in 2022.
Phishing remains one of the most common attack vectors, although reported phishing attacks fell by 7% year over year to 300,497 incidents. Even with that decrease, phishing is still the most common crime type in terms of victim count ahead of personal data breaches with 58,859 complaints and non-payment/non-delivery with 51,679 complaints.
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Business email compromise (BEC) ranked 9th out of all crime types in terms of complaints but ranked 2nd in terms of reported losses with $2,742,354,049 lost to BEC attacks in 2022. BEC attacks increased 9% year-over-year although losses to the scams were down almost 14.5%. BEC was knocked from the top spot this year by investment scams, which saw $3,311,742,206 in reported losses, up 127% from 2021. The FBI reports an unprecedented increase in crypto investment schemes in 2022 in terms of both victim count and losses.
There was a major increase in tech support scams in 2022, which rose to 3rd place in terms of losses. Tech support scam complaints increased by 36% year-over-year to 32,538 complaints and losses to these scams increased by almost 132% to $806,551,993.
The FBI stressed the importance of reporting instances of cybercrime of any type and confirmed assistance will be provided to try to recover losses. The IC3 Recovery Asset Team (RAT) has a 73% success rate in freezing funds and limiting losses and has frozen $433.30 million in funds out of $590.62 million in reported losses across 2,838 incidents.
