Dusseldorf For companies around the world, cybercrime is becoming the number one business threat. A good 42 percent of companies with sales of more than one billion dollars have been the target of hacker attacks in the past two years, according to a survey on white-collar crime published by the auditing company PwC on Thursday. More than 1300 executives from all over the world took part.
Cybercrime has thus become the number one crime against companies. So far, companies have been the most affected by customer fraud. However, this has decreased significantly in the course of the corona pandemic. The managers surveyed see hacker attacks as the greatest danger in the future.
The technology sector is the one most affected by white-collar crime. Almost two-thirds of the technology, media and telecommunications companies surveyed said they had been victims of criminal activities in the past two years. Overall, however, it can be seen that the number of cases has not increased further since 2020 and has even fallen slightly in Germany.
Because of this, the nature of the deeds changes. For decades, the statistics compiled by PwC and other auditing firms have said: The greatest dangers for companies emanate from their own employees. In the meantime, however, external groups of perpetrators are on the rise, either acting alone or in alliance with company employees.
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Criminal hacker groups in particular are arming themselves: through cooperation, perpetrators are able to “perform attacks on a larger scale and at a higher technical level,” warns PwC. There are specialists for data theft, creating false identities, hacking into IT systems and for transactions, for example cryptocurrencies.
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The greatest threat to the IT security of companies is currently the so-called ransomware, with which perpetrators encrypt important data – they demand a ransom for the release, to be paid in a cryptocurrency. The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) warns that it is a “real, serious threat” in a catalog of measures. The probability that a company or an authority will be hit is “currently high and realistic”.
As a result of digitization, the attack surface has grown significantly: According to PwC, external groups of criminals are increasingly abusing digital platforms, such as social media and e-commerce platforms. These are gateways into the entire organization: “Once criminals have gained access, they can commit a wide variety of white-collar crimes that affect the entire company,” says the report.
Many organizations are reacting to this: investments in IT security are increasing significantly. According to a forecast by the market researcher IDC on behalf of the industry association Bitkom, sales of hardware, software and services rose by almost ten percent to 6.2 billion euros last year. Average growth of 9.5 percent is expected by 2025 – the corona pandemic has made the vulnerability of IT systems clear.
However, it is not only external attacks on the IT infrastructure that will increase, as the managers surveyed by PwC state. Their concern also applies to the supply chains, whose vulnerability has been shown in the pandemic. Some of the companies have fundamentally changed their procurement and now fear an increase in cases of fraud within the supply chain.
In addition, there is noticeable uncertainty about how to deal with sustainability reporting (ESG). The risk there is that results would be manipulated and that the documented progress was no longer truthful, according to the PwC survey.
The majority of respondents see it as a huge challenge to closely monitor company ESG metrics and reports. There are also legal consequences here, as the investigations into the fund provider DWS on suspicion of “greenwashing” show.
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