Estimating the Global Cost of Cyber Risk

There is marked variability from study to study in the estimated direct and systemic costs of cyber incidents, which is further complicated by the considerable variation in cyber risk in different countries and industry sectors. This report shares a transparent and adaptable methodology for estimating present and future global costs of cyber risk that acknowledges the considerable uncertainty in the frequencies and costs of cyber incidents. Specifically, this methodology (1) identifies the value at risk by country and industry sector; (2) computes direct costs by considering multiple financial exposures for each industry sector and the fraction of each exposure that is potentially at risk to cyber incidents; and (3) computes the systemic costs of cyber risk between industry sectors using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development input, output, and value-added data across sectors in more than 60 countries. The report has a companion Excel-based modeling and simulation platform that allows users to alter assumptions and investigate a wide variety of research questions. The authors used a literature review and data to create multiple sample sets of parameters. They then ran a set of case studies to show the model's functionality and to compare the results against those in the existing literature. The resulting values are highly sensitive to input parameters; for instance, the global cost of cyber crime has direct gross domestic product (GDP) costs of $275 billion to $6.6 trillion and total GDP costs (direct plus systemic) of $799 billion to $22.5 trillion (1.1 to 32.4 percent of GDP).