2024 FBI Internet Crime Report: 33% Increase in Losses Fueled by Phishing, Investment Fraud, Ransomware
For the 25th year, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released the Internet Crime Report. To give you an idea of how internet crimes continue to multiply, in its early years, IC3 would get about 2,000 complaints each year; now, the agency averages 2,000 complaints per day.
2024 Internet Crime Trends: Phishing and Spoofing Lead Record-Breaking Losses
The 859,532 complaints from 2024 bring into focus the continuing threat of phishing and spoofing—the top complaint type coming in at 193,407. For comparison, the next highest complaint was extortion at 86,415 reports.
Though total complaints and those for phishing/spoofing dropped slightly, total losses rose to $16.6 billion, the highest ever reported.
Real-World Fallout from Email-Based Threats
Based on internet crimes reported to the IC3 in 2024, the agency finds that investment scams, “deceptive practice that induces investors to make purchases based on false information,” were the crime type with the highest financial loss at over $6.5 billion.
It’s worth noting here that phishing and investment scams are closely related: phishing and domain spoofing are often employed as a credential theft tactic in investment fraud.
For example, a criminal might send a fraudulent email that appears to come from the target’s bank; the victim clicks a link, enters login credentials, and that’s it. Their credentials are stolen and the criminal drains the account.
Credential theft is all-too-common and criminals are able to gain entry into networks to download personally identifiable information, like login credentials; install ransomware and otherwise cripple an IT system.
Phishing attacks have been growing in scale and sophistication, and research reveals that cybercriminals are increasingly targeting high-value identity data that can be used for follow-on attacks like ransomware, account takeover, and fraud.
- 94% of Fortune 50 companies have exposed employee data
- 81% of phished records contain email addresses
- 2/3 of records include credentials, financial info, or visitor metadata
—SpyCloud
Ransomware on the Rise: Why Phishing Prevention Is Critical
As reported by other organizations, like Verizon, ransomware had another year of growth. IC3 reports that it was the most widespread threat to critical infrastructure with complaints rising 9% from 2023.
Ransomware is also very much in play with organizations not falling into the critical infrastructure sector. Just last quarter, Lee Enterprises, a public company providing local news and marketing services, suffered a ransomware attack and paid $2 million in costs associated with the breach.
Because phishing is the top method for installing ransomware, CISA recommends that users and email operators “enable strong spam filters to prevent phishing emails from reaching the end users and authenticate inbound email using technologies like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to prevent email spoofing.”
Last year federal agencies warned that attackers were seeking domains with the DMARC policy of p=none to orchestrate social engineering intrusions.
How the FBI Fought Back Against Internet Crime in 2024
In 2024 the FBI reports that they took proactive steps to reduce losses and protect victims by working with the private sector through initiatives like Operation Level Up. They dismantled fraud and money laundering networks, closed scam call centers and illegal marketplaces, disrupted malicious botnets and arrested hundreds of offenders.
We dealt a serious blow to LockBit, one of the world’s most active ransomware groups. Since 2022, we have offered up thousands of decryption keys to victims of ransomware, avoiding over $800 million in payments.
—2024 Internet crime report
In 2024 the FBI uncovered 67 new ransomware variants and regularly provides intelligence updates to FBI Field Offices to help discover evolving ransomware variants to determine the targets and coordinate a response to prevent system disruption, financial loss and brand damage.
“The criminals Americans face today may look different than in years past, but they still want the same thing: to harm Americans for their own benefit,” says B. Chad Yarbrough, FBI Operations Director for Criminal and Cyber.
We’re Here to Help
With a team of email security experts and a mission of making email and the internet more trustworthy through domain security, dmarcian is here to help assess an organization’s domain catalog and implement and manage DMARC for the long haul.
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