New trends identified by research teams at Cybersecurity Ventures state that cybercrime will cost global businesses $6 trillion in the next two years, up from $3 trillion in 2015. Ransomware played a key factor in this, costing $11.5 billion alone, while state-sponsored attacks are on the rise. Experts also cited the changes with GDPR for the apparent increase in data breaches.

The forthcoming 5G movement is causing concerns among experts, who say it still has the potential to be hacked. While the wide consensus is that 5G is considerably stronger than 4G, thanks to encryption and verification of network users, experts say devices may be the problem. IoT devices such as baby monitors and factory assembly lines may be susceptible to attacks from hackers as they will soon be using the 5G network. David Ferbrache, global head of cyber futures at KPMG, said: “The likelihood of finding an IoT device that hasn’t been set up properly, or with a weak password, is quite high.”

Facebook has once again been the victim of a data breach. Its image sharing company, Instagram, which Facebook purchased in 2012, was attacked in late September. Millions of users had their phone numbers and usernames leaked. However, the attacker was deemed a “white hat hacker” and was a security researcher. The hacker claimed to have found vulnerabilities in the “Sync Contacts” feature and said other hackers could have done the same.

October is known internationally as Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and this year, more firms than ever are recognising the increasing importance of cybersecurity. The awareness month was started by the National Cybersecurity Division of Homeland Security in the USA, and now its principles have reached businesses around the world. Many are publishing their own tips on how to stay safe in the workplace and state that employee training and refresher courses are a must.

A new white paper on decentralised password security is now live. Published by Julia O’Toole of MyCena, Redefining Password Security explores the most common flaws in password management, and the need for a decentralised password management system that is not vulnerable to cloud hacks. Read more on the MyCena website or visit the Mycena LinkedIn page.

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia said it was experiencing “intermittent outages” when it appeared to have been the target of a cyber-attack in early September. The site was down over the course of one evening and early morning, affecting 94% of all users in Russia, America and the Middle East. A later statement on the Wikimedia German Twitter account claimed that the platform had been the victim of a “very broad DDoS attack”.