Cybersecurity Statistics You Should Know in 2026

Cybercrime is now considered one of the world’s most profitable criminal industries, with global damages projected to reach $10.5 trillion annually. The cybersecurity industry is responding with spending expected to surpass $215 billion and continue growing at 12.3% annually through 2028.

These cybersecurity statistics cover the most common attack types, the largest data breaches on record, industry-specific breach costs, and the key trends shaping how organizations are defending themselves.

Cyberattack Types and How They Work

Cyber risks are growing in both scale and complexity. Cybercriminals use different methods depending on the target, the goal, and the vulnerabilities available to exploit.

Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware has become one of the most financially damaging forms of cybercrime globally. Manufacturing and critical infrastructure face the highest volume of incidents.

• Around 27% of all malware attacks now involve ransomware, with attacks occurring approximately every 11 seconds globally.
• The average ransom payment reached $1.84 million in 2025, nearly double the previous year’s average.
• Only 4% of organizations that paid a ransom recovered all of their data.
• Manufacturing has ranked as the most ransomware-targeted industry for the fifth consecutive year.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing remains the most common entry point for data breaches worldwide. Generative AI has made phishing emails significantly harder to detect and cheaper to produce at scale.

• Phishing is responsible for 36% of all data breaches.
• BEC (business email compromise) generated $2.9 billion in reported losses in 2025, making it one of the costliest social engineering tactics in operation.
• Phishing emails exploiting sensitive information, such as payroll data or executive credentials, account for the majority of BEC incidents.

Zero-day Attacks

Zero-day vulnerabilities are software flaws that vendors are unaware of when they are exploited. They are among the hardest threats to defend against because there is no patch available at the time of the attack.

Google’s Threat Analysis Group recorded 97 zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in the wild in 2023, the highest annual total ever documented.

Hackers exploiting zero-day flaws increasingly target supply chain software, allowing a single breach to cascade across thousands of organizations simultaneously.

DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more frequent and are often paired with a secondary intrusion on the same network. These attacks overwhelm network security controls by flooding systems with traffic until legitimate access is blocked.

• DDoS attack frequency increased 56% year-over-year.
• Microsoft reported mitigating an average of over 1,700 DDoS attacks per day in 2023, highlighting the scale of these threats.

Largest Data Breaches on Record

A small number of breaches have been large enough to reshape data protection regulations and security practices across entire industries.

• Yahoo (2013–2014): 3 billion accounts compromised across two breaches, the largest in history. The breach went undisclosed for over two years.
• Equifax (2017): Personal data of 147 million people exposed, including Social Security numbers and financial records. Equifax paid a 700 million USD FTC settlement.
• Facebook / Meta (2019): 530 million user records scraped and publicly published in 2021, including phone numbers, full names, and email addresses.
• T-Mobile (2021): 77 million customers affected, with Social Security numbers and driver’s license data among the exposed records.
• MOVEit (2023): A single zero-day vulnerability impacted over 2,500 organizations and exposed data belonging to more than 66 million individuals across healthcare, financial services, and government.

Cybersecurity Threats by Industry

Industries that handle large volumes of sensitive data or operate critical systems face both higher targeting rates and greater financial exposure.

Healthcare

• The healthcare industry recorded an average breach cost of $10.93 million per incident, the highest of any sector, and a figure driven largely by the value of patient-sensitive information on the dark web.
• Patient records sell for up to $1,000 each on the dark web, compared to $5 to $10 for a stolen credit card number.

Banking and Financial Services

• The average breach cost for financial services is $6.08 million, the second-highest among sectors.
• A recent study found that 56.4% of respondents had been targeted by financial scams, and 58.8% of those individuals knew they were being scammed.

Education

• Ransomware attacks on schools and universities grew by over 70% between 2019 and 2022.
• The average breach cost for education stands at $3.79 million.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing has been the most targeted industry for ransomware for five years, as attackers exploit production systems where downtime is costly, and companies are more likely to pay quickly.

With Internet of Things devices increasingly connected to factory floor systems, endpoint vulnerabilities have become one of the fastest-growing entry points for attackers in the sector.

• Attacks against manufacturers rose 56%, increasing from 937 incidents in 2024 to 1,466 in 2025.
• Manufacturing represents 26% of all incidents within the top 10 industries.
• The median cost of a manufacturing ransomware attack is now $600,000 USD.
• 62% of manufacturers paid ransoms despite 66% having backup compromises.

Retail and E-commerce

• Cyber attacks against retail businesses cost $3.54 million on average in 2025, a 17% increase year over year.
• Between 70% and 80% of retail businesses are reported to have faced cyber attacks in 2025.
• The retail sector experienced 837 cyber incidents, leading to 419 confirmed data breaches in Q2 2025, according to Verizon’s DBIR.
• Phishing is the top method for attacking retail businesses, involved in 65% of attacks.

Government and Public Sector

• Government agencies were targeted in 274 campaigns in 2025, the largest share among all industries, according to HPE Threat Labs.
• Cyberattacks on government organizations were up roughly 26% year over year by mid-2025.
• By volume of attempts, government was in the top three most-targeted industries worldwide, averaging around 2,500 cyberattacks per week per organization.
• The public sector recorded the largest percentage increase in breach costs in 2025, up 10.8%, or $310,000 per breach.
• The first half of 2025 saw a 65% year-over-year increase in ransomware incidents affecting government bodies, with 208 confirmed attacks.

These attacks frequently target national security infrastructure and citizen data, with unauthorized access to government networks carrying consequences well beyond financial loss.

Emerging Trends in Cybersecurity

The tools and strategies used to defend against threats are changing as fast as the attacks themselves. These three trends are having the most measurable impact on how organizations approach security:

AI in Threat Detection and Vulnerability Prediction

Artificial intelligence is now central to how security teams detect threats, respond to incidents, and predict vulnerabilities before they are exploited. Many organizations now evaluate cybersecurity software based on AI detection capability as a primary criterion.

• Organizations using AI and automation in security operations save an average of $2.22 million per breach.
• AI-powered tools provide real-time threat detection, reducing the average time to identify a security breach from 194 days to under 100 days in mature deployments.
• 85% of cybersecurity professionals expect generative AI to make attacks more sophisticated within the next two years.

Zero trust adoption

Zero trust is built on the principle that no user or device should be trusted by default. CISOs increasingly cite zero trust as the foundational framework for modern data security, though adoption remains low despite its demonstrated impact on reducing breach costs.

• Only 35% of organizations have fully implemented zero-trust architecture.
• Multi-factor authentication, a core zero-trust security measure, blocks over 99.9% of automated credential attacks when properly deployed.

Small businesses adopting basic zero-trust controls, including endpoint protection and firewalls, report significantly lower rates of successful intrusions than those relying solely on legacy network security.

Cyber insurance

Cyber insurance has shifted from a niche product to a standard business requirement. Premiums have risen sharply alongside the growth in ransomware claims.

• The global cyber insurance market is projected to reach $29 billion by 2027, up from under $7 billion in 2020, reflecting the rising cost of cybercrime across all industries.
• Average premiums rose by 50%, driven by a surge in ransomware-related claims.
• Only 55% of organizations currently carry a cyber insurance policy, leaving nearly half exposed to the full financial cost of a breach.

Investing early in the right tools and frameworks significantly reduces breach costs and recovery time.

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