Bank of America: Cybercrime Could Be ‘World’s Third-Largest Economy’

The cost of cyberattacks is reportedly growing alongside the increases in digitization and artificial intelligence (AI).

“If cybercrime damage were a state, it would be the world’s third-largest economy,” Bank of America said in a Thursday investor note, Seeking Alpha reported Thursday (Oct. 10).

The financial institution’s note added that 60% of organizations were hit by ransomware in 2023, the average payment increased fivefold compared to the previous year, and the average cost of a data breach has risen 10% in 2024, according to the report.

This report came a day after Fidelity Investments disclosed a data breach that affected 77,099 customers.

In that incident, customers’ Fidelity accounts were not accessed, but unspecified personal information was obtained by a third party, the company said in a notice of data breach letter sent to consumers and posted online by the Office of the Maine Attorney General.

“Between August 17 and August 19, a third party accessed and obtained certain information without authorization using two customer accounts that they had recently established,” Fidelity Investments said in the letter. “We detected this activity on August 19 and immediately took steps to terminate the access.”

In another, separate development announced Wednesday (Oct. 9), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said it plans to require Marriott International and its subsidiary Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide to implement a comprehensive security program after the company suffered three large data breaches from 2014 to 2020.

The data breaches spotlighted by the FTC include one that began in June 2014, went undetected for 14 months and affected 14,000 Starwood customers; another that began around July 2014, went undetected for over four years and saw fraudsters access 339 million Starwood guest accounts; and a third data breach that began in September 2018, went undetected until February 2020 and saw fraudsters access 5.2 million Marriott guest records.

PYMNTS Intelligence found in September 2022 that 25% of executives at financial institutions with $500 billion or more in assets saw the new sophistication of fraud as a barrier to data security.

In addition, 62% of executives at financial institutions with over $5 billion in assets said they had seen an increase in financial crime compared to the previous year, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Featurespace collaboration, “The State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S.”