$2 trillion cybercrime bill for business by 2019

The cost of data breaches is expected increase almost four-fold to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, with the majority of breaches coming from existing IT and network infrastructure rather than headline grabbing mobile and IoT devices, according to a new report.

The Juniper Research report, The future of cybercrime and security: Financial and corporate threats and mitigation, says hacktivism is increasingly 'professionalising' and going after bigger targets.

This, combined with the rapid digitisation of consumers' lives and enterprise records, will help drive the increased data breaches, with the cost of breaches in 2019 jumping almost four times over the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.

The report says the majority of breaches will come from existing IT and network infrastructure, and says while new threats targeting mobile devices and the internet of things are being reported at an increasing rate, the number of infected devices is minimal in comparison to more traditional computing devices.

James Moar, who authored the report, says currently we aren't seeing much dangerous mobile or IoT malware because it's not profitable.

"The kind of threats we will see on these devices will be either ransomware, with consumers' devices locked down until they pay the hackers to use their devices, or as part of botnets, where the processing power is harnessed as part of a more lucarative hack," Moar says.

"With the absence of a direct payout from IoT hacks, there is little motive for criminals to develop the required tools," he adds.

Juniper says hacktivism is becoming more successful and less prolific, in fact, the market analysts expect fewer attacks overall, but more successful ones, with the average cost of a data breach expected to exceed $150 million by 2020, as more business infrastructure gets connected.

The emergence of cybercrime products, such as the sale of malware creation software, over the past year, along with a decline in casual activist attacks are also highlighted.

Looking to this year, Juniper says it expects nearly 60% of anticipated data breaches worldwide to occur in North America, but this proportion will decrease over time as other countries become both richer and more digitised.