Table of Contents
Main conclusions
The percentage of phishing attacks for which cryptography is responsible has more than tripled to 6.6% in 2022 The percentage of phishing attacks for which cryptography is responsible is lower than other industries when compared to the overall market cap The industry Payments industry saw a 6.1% increase in phishing scams from 2021 Regulators will be looking at these studies as they aim to craft legislation for the still fledgling industry, but the SaaS, social media and payments industries have a record of phishing proportionately larger.
Introduction
Everyone knows someone who has fallen for a phishing scam. These scams seem to be becoming more and more prevalent, but I was curious to see what the divide was between industries and which sectors are suffering the most. Furthermore, with cryptocurrency often being used as a playground for criminals and their scams, do the numbers really confirm this bias?
Phishing Attacks in 2021
In 2021, cryptocurrency was responsible for just 2% of phishing attacks, as the chart below shows. The dominant industries were financial services, social media and SaaS/webmail, which together contributed to over 68% of attacks. However, the first quarter of 2021 is long gone in the cryptocurrency world. The industry’s market cap started that quarter at just under $800 billion (closed nearing $2 trillion after explosive growth). So how do these numbers compare to one year – Q1 2022? The cryptocurrency’s market cap was $2.2 trillion going into the quarter (and then $2.1 trillion coming out of it, actually relatively stable – the bloodbath started in the second quarter). So, with the cryptocurrency market much larger and more established, as the market cap was 2.8 times higher in 2022 than in 2021, this helps to contextualize the fact that phishing attacks as a percentage have increased by more than 3 times, from 2% to 6.6% Over the last year. The full chart showing all sectors is below, showing the updated position of how the cryptocurrency compares to other sectors.
Movement compared to other industries
Another takeaway from the numbers is the fact that phishing attacks targeting the payments industry increased by 6.1%, despite the industry not moving much in terms of overall size. This shows more context for the growth of the cryptocurrency cipher, as the industry is not very different from payments, suggesting that perhaps this is becoming more of a target for phishing attacks. However, seeing payments attacks jump so heavily is significantly more shocking than the move in cryptocurrencies, which has a very real reason to point to the growing size of the industry and the fact that regulation has yet to catch up.
industry size
However, with the size of the cryptocurrency now coming in above several sectors in the study, this needs to be considered – the size of the market obviously affects how common phishing attacks are. In fact, the SaaS/webmail industry has a significantly bigger problem with 20% of attacks, but an estimated industry value of less than $200 billion is well below cryptocurrencies. The prevalence of social media attacks also surpasses cryptocurrencies worth $200 billion, accounting for 12.5% of total attacks (and that number was north of 20% the year before). The payments industry also, the graph shows, compares unfavorably with cryptocurrency.
Conclusion
When evaluating what all this means, first of all, the change from 2% to 6.6% in the last year corresponds more or less to the growth of the industry, which is expected. Also, compared to other industries, cryptography doesn’t seem to be an exception, with the amount of attacks compared to the size of the industry lagging behind others like SaaS, social media, and payments. The data therefore suggests that cryptocurrency is somewhat unfairly tarnished with its wild west reputation, although it remains a problem. There’s no getting around the fact that space definitely has a dark side, if only that’s a small proportion of all the innovation and progress being made elsewhere. And it is this dark side that we hope will begin to come under control, and what regulators will have their eyes on – however, when looking at the numbers and comparing with other industries, cryptocurrency is not alone, and the good far outweighs the bad. .
Sources
2021 2022 Online Payments Market -> Fortune GlobalNewsWire
