The State of Email Security 2022

A Digital Pandemic of EPIC PROPORTIONS

Like the virus responsible for the worldwide pandemic, email-based cyber threats continued to mutate in 2021, causing global havoc.

As Mimecast’s sixth annual State of Email Security report makes clear, businesses around the world continued to find themselves in the crosshairs not just of a novel coronavirus, but also a torrent of new cyberattacks. Any hope that this onslaught would abate once the world had adjusted to the pandemic was short lived.

In 2021, the cyber threat landscape in country after country became more treacherous, not less.

With the number of publicly reported data breaches soaring past last year’s total, 2021 appears to be the worst year on record for cybersecurity. Phishing was the biggest culprit, with 36% of data breaches due, at least in part, to employee credentials stolen through a phishing attack, 96% of which occur through email.

Ransomware is also running amok. According to recent reports, a staggering 84% of U.S. organizations have reported phishing or ransomware attacks in the past 12 months and the average ransomware payment climbed to $570,000 during the first half of 2021, up from $312,000 in 2020.

2021 appears to be the worst year on record for cybersecurity.

But for organizations that have been infected, the financial costs of this digital pandemic have been much higher. The average cost of a data breach is now $4.24 million, up from $3.86 million in 2020. A data breach that compromises 10 million records costs a business $50 million on average; one that compromises 50 million records can cost as much as $392 million.

All this has led to a change in how cyber threats are perceived by corporate leadership. The research firm Gartner tracks board-level attitudes toward cybersecurity — and has seen a sharp shift. Five years ago, only 58% of board members considered cyber-based threats a significant business risk. In 2021, that figure rose to 88%…