Latest ITRC Report Charts Identity Crime Rebound

The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) has published its latest annual “Business Impact Report” (“BIR”), based on surveys of 551 small business owners, leaders, and employees.

The ITRC found a record number of cyberattacks against small businesses in the three years it has been conducting this survey. And while the percentage of businesses reporting lost revenue due to an attack was three percent lower compared to last year, at 42 percent, there were higher rates of other impacts including the percentage of businesses reporting lost customer trust (32 percent) and higher employee turnover (32 percent).

Also notable is the fact that many respondents reported increased difficulty understanding what happened. That may speak to growing sophistication on the part of their attackers, and to the need for guidance and expertise from bona fide cybersecurity experts in the aftermath of an incident.

Readers of the report may raise their eyebrows at another finding: 17 percent of data breach victims said they did not send notices to impacted customers — but half of those explained that this reticence was adopted at the request of law enforcement, while the rest mainly said that no personal information was exposed or that there was no risk of harm from the compromised data.

The report’s publication comes after the ITRC’s “2023 Consumer Impact Report” illustrated the human cost of cybercrime in late summer. Among other things, that report noted that 16 percent of the individuals it surveyed who had experienced identity theft said they had thoughts of suicide after the attack, an increase of 10 percent from the previous year.

According to ITRC CEO and President Eva Velasquez, the trends identified in the organization’s latest report “follow the same patterns” detected in previous research. “We saw a spike in attacks in 2021 before a reduction last year due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and disruption in the cryptocurrency markets,” she explained. “Identity crime markets have rebounded this year, leading to record levels of breaches, suicide rates, and business attacks.”

Velasquez was among the speakers in FindBiometrics’ most recent Virtual Identity Summit, “Around the World with Secure Identity”, which is now available on demand.

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October 30, 2023 – by Alex Perala