Have you ever considered that nearly every electronic device can be hacked?
I know I have.
Today we’ll look at some hacking statistics to illustrate the impact of hackers’ activities in modern society. Naturally, hacks are a great concern for website owners – that’s why all reviews here on Hosting Tribunal focus heavily on security – but the truth is that all Web denizens are susceptible to hacking activity.
In the text below you will find some fantastic stats which will help us to find out:
- Which is the biggest bank heist that was pulled off by cybercriminals?
- Which is the most significant data breach of our time?
- Are ATMs vulnerable to hacker attacks?
- When did the first hack happen?
Also, we’ll visit the dark web’s markets to see how much it costs to buy a new identity.
Now let’s get this show on the road with some hacking stats.
Scary Hacking Statistics (Editor’s Choice)
- Attackers move through a network in 29 minutes on average.
- More than 450,000 new malware and unwanted apps appear every day.
- Multi-factor authentication and encryption are the biggest hacker obstacles.
- Bug bounty hunters earned $81 million on HackerOne in a year.
Sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Let’s delve in deeper and find more details about each one.
Outrageous Hacking Statistics
Some of the cyber breaches are audacious, others outrageous, yet others simply stunning.
1. Cybercrime is more profitable than the global illegal drug trade.
(Source: Cybersecurity Ventures)
The profit from the illegal drug industry amounts to around $400 billion annually. For comparison, Cybersecurity Ventures puts the global cost of cybercrime at $10.5 trillion in 2025, rising to a projected $12.2 trillion by 2031.
2. 67% of organizations aren’t fully confident they could recover their data.
(Source: Cohesity, via Security Today)
Most businesses don’t really know if they’re prepared for a cyber attack. In a survey of IT and security decision-makers, two-thirds lacked full confidence that their company could recover its data and critical business processes after a system-wide attack.
Cyber attacks statistics reveal that in 2018:
3. 73% of black hat hackers said traditional firewall and antivirus security is irrelevant or obsolete.
(Source: Thycotic.com)
According to the same survey, 80% of hackers say “humans are the most responsible for security breaches”.
Like everything, there’s a balance in the cyber-world as well. Hacking facts show that:
4. White hat hackers earned $81 million in bounties in a year.
(Source: HackerOne)
HackerOne paid out $81 million between July 2024 and June 2025, a 13% rise on the year before. What’s interesting here is that 81% of hackers learned their craft mostly through blogs and educational materials online. Only 6% completed a formal class.
5. There are over 715,000 cybersecurity experts employed in the US alone.
(Source: Cyberseek)
There were 313,735 job openings for cybersecurity experts until August 2018. This number will continue to grow as we’ll see a bit later. Cybersecurity statistics assure us this will be one of the best paying jobs in the near future.
Are you learning stuff? Good, those stats are awesome. All these numbers look impressive, don’t they? There are more to come, but let’s pause for a second to see the world through hackers’ eyes.
For example – if you see new technology, the first logical question you may pose is – “What does it do?”
Hackers see it differently, though – their question is “What can I make it do?”
These statistics on hacking may not help us understand how a hacker thinks, but we can make some definitive conclusions about their nature.
First off, let me explain the difference between a black hat hacker, a white hat hacker, and grey hat hacker.
Black hat hackers are hackers with criminal intent.
White hat hackers are hired to test the security of a system. They have permission to do it.
Grey hat hackers don’t have criminal motives, but once they start exploiting a system, they can break some laws.
Now that we have the basics, let’s continue with some…
Scary Hacker Statistics
The things below are checked facts, not empty statements.
6. Attackers move through a network in 29 minutes on average.
(Source: Crowdstrike)
Want to reread the above stat? 29 minutes. I drink my morning coffee longer than that.
That is the average eCrime breakout time, the gap between an intruder landing on one machine and moving to the next. It has collapsed from 98 minutes in 2021, and the fastest case CrowdStrike recorded took 27 seconds. The company no longer breaks the figure out by country.
7. Hackers are the average American’s biggest fear.
(Source: Statista)
71% of Americans are wary of hackers stealing their credit card or financial info. Considering how many cyber attacks happen per day in the US, we can understand why that is. US citizens also worry about the possibility of identity theft – 67%.
The possibility of being assaulted or killed by a co-worker where you work – 7%. I sure don’t want to go to their office.
8. A stolen personal record sells for $1 to $4 on the dark market.
(Source: SOCRadar)
You can buy a bus ticket for a dollar. Or you can buy a ticket to an ecommerce site. The choice is yours.
When looking at data breach statistics, we can see that billions of records have been stolen. This created an abundance of credentials for sale, which reflects on their price. Bank logins still cost far more – between $200 and $500 a piece. Most other online accounts cost $1 or less.
9. More than 6,000 online criminal marketplaces sell ransomware products and services.
(Source: McAfee)
A total of 45,000 products are on sale there. If we add all non-ransomware products and services, the number will easily exceed 1 million.
10. 444,259 ransomware attacks took place worldwide in 2018.
(Source: Statista)
Almost 1 in 4 (100,907) occurred within the consumer marketplace.
Hacking statistics also show us that:
11. More than 450,000 new malware samples appear daily.
(Source: AV-TEST)
I guess some people’s fingers never sleep. Let’s hope cybersecurity specialists are up to the task.
And speaking of cybersecurity specialists:
12. There are 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide.
(Source: Cybersecurityventures)
In the United States alone, employers posted 514,359 listings for cybersecurity and closely related roles over a recent 12-month period, about 57,000 more than the previous year. The 3.5 million figure is the global shortfall of people to fill roles like these.
Now let’s have a break from the hacking statistics for a while.
See, hackers are like you and me in a way. They are curious about the world and themselves. Some of them describe hacking as an adrenaline rush. All people have “their thing” – some dance, some climb mountains and so on. Hackers exploit vulnerabilities. Come to think of it – it’s like a puzzle. Put all the right pieces together, and voila.
Now let’s imagine a situation. You are in a hotel. There is a TV in your room. What do you see? “A TV”, most of you would say. What does a hacker see? A gateway to the hotel’s network. It’s similar to any other target.
How and Why Companies Get Hacked
Businesses are deemed lucrative and often easy prey. However good security measures the likes of Hostinger and Scala Hosting provide, business owners must be ever vigilant.
13. 88% of organizations have stale but still enabled “ghost user” accounts.
(Source: Varonis)
Stale accounts and outdated permissions are targets for exploitation and malicious use. Hackers desire data, and they can get it by hijacking an account. Varonis found the average organization carries about 15,000 of these accounts, plus roughly 176,000 inactive external identities belonging to contractors, vendors and partners.
While we’re on the topic:
14. 32% of black hat hackers admit privileged accounts are their number one way to hack systems.
(Source: Thycotic)
Seizing such an account could be pretty easy with a simple phishing attack.
15. 85% of affected UK businesses identified phishing attacks.
(Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025)
Fraudulent emails as part of a phishing strategy are still a hacker’s favorite tool to obtain credentials.
Computer hacking statistics also show that:
16. 7% of UK businesses temporarily lost access to their files or networks.
(Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025)
That is up from 4% the year before, and it counts only the businesses that suffered a breach serious enough to lock them out of their own systems.
17. Companies protect only 3% of their folders.
(Source: Varonis)
And 88% of companies with over 1 million folders have over 100,000 folders open to everyone. Certainly makes a hacker’s job easier.
Lousy protection is one of the main reasons why…
18. 43% of UK businesses have reported breaches or attacks in the last 12 months.
(Source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025)
Cyber attack statistics show 74% of large businesses report such events.
So far we’ve looked at the possibilities for hackers to cause damage. Now let’s check out some examples of their handiwork:
How Giants Fall – Data Breach Statistics
The numbers in some of the biggest data breaches are stupefyingly big.
19. Yahoo’s data breach – 3 billion compromised accounts.
(Source: CSO)
It’s quite a story. In 2016 Yahoo admits the truth about the most significant data breach in history. They publicly state that 500 million users’ accounts were compromised in 2014.
Later the company declared there was another breach in 2013 with another 1 billion compromised accounts. Finally, in 2017, Yahoo said the whole truth – the attacks had compromised a total of 3 billion user accounts.
It is still the most significant data breach in history.
One of the recent big hacks happened in 2017, when…
20. 209,000 payment card numbers and expiration dates were stolen from Equifax.
(Source: Reuters)
146.6 million names, dates of birth and 145.5 million US social security numbers were taken as well from the credit monitoring firm.
21. Marriott International – 383 million records stolen.
(Source: CSO)
In 2018 Marriott International discovered attackers who had remained in the system since 2014. The company first estimated up to 500 million guests were affected, then revised the figure down to about 383 million records, noting that number still overstates the guests involved because many people had multiple records. Some records included payment card numbers and expiration dates, others names and passport numbers.
Since we started talking about money, I want to ask you a question – where is the money?
Once upon a time, there were some people with lots of money. They had so much money, they had to build a house for their money. And that’s how banks appeared.
In the next section, we’ll take a look at the banks hacked in 2018. What do criminals do with banks? They rob them. Cybercriminals do pretty much the same thing, in a more subtle way.
22. Hackers siphoned off $13.4 million from Cosmos Bank in India.
(Source: Hindustan Times)
In 2018 Cybercriminals hacked the bank’s servers on August 11 and 13. The culprits stole the card details of around 12,000 Visa cards.
Long story short – the hackers made it rain 15,000 transactions later.
The next one is really exciting. It makes Jesse James look like a harmless kid on the path of righteousness (his dad was a preacher).
One of the most interesting hacking facts online is that:
23. The Carbanak gang of hackers has stolen over $1 billion in total.
(Source: Kaspersky)
We can’t classify this as the biggest bank robbery in history, but it sure is interesting. They targeted around 100 banks around the world, and it took 2-4 months to siphon the money out from each one. The losses per bank were up to $10 million each. The cybercriminals started to test the Carbanak malware in 2013, and it’s still on the loose.
The good news is in 2018 the authorities caught the mastermind in Spain.
These next few cyber hacking statistics visualize how much cybercrime can cost us.
24. Cybercrime cost the world more than $1 trillion in 2020.
(Source: McAfee)
That was about 1% of global GDP at the time, and more than double the $600 billion McAfee estimated for 2018.
To acquire such amounts of money, black hat hackers need specific tools. You can’t find most of them just anywhere. Where do they get them? Let’s find out.
Dark Market Stats
The dark web’s customers may find almost everything there. Thankfully the light side has some tricks prepared to change those numbers.
25. 68% of black hat hackers say multi-factor authentication and encryption are the biggest hacker obstacles.
(Source: Thycotic)
Use 2FA whenever possible. Just a tip.
The dark web can’t help you much with 2FA, but there’s a lot of stuff you can buy if you have some Bitcoins ready.
26. A stolen Netflix account sells for a median of $4.55.
(Source: NordVPN Research Lab)
Netflix streaming is one of the standard hacking services and widely available. For a small fee, you’ll receive the email and password of someone’s Netflix account. Researchers who examined about 75,000 dark web listings found streaming accounts averaging $15.60, with Netflix listings sitting at a median of $4.55. Just imagine how many credentials have been stolen for the price to get this low.
27. More than 700 ATM jackpotting incidents hit the US in 2025.
(Source: FBI)
Jackpotting means infecting a cash machine with malware and making it empty its cassettes. The FBI counted over 700 such incidents in 2025, with losses above $20 million, part of roughly 1,900 recorded since 2020. There are several ways to hack an ATM, but consider this: if your card data is stolen, every ATM is vulnerable to that kind of attack.
When talking about the dark web and hackers, a question arises – How many hackers are there?
No one knows.
But we can make an educated guess based on the following stat:
28. Roughly 2 to 2.5 million people connect directly to Tor each day.
(Source: Tor Metrics, Europol)
The Tor Project publishes its own daily estimate of users connecting straight to the network, which has sat in that range in recent years. Back in 2017, when Europol last counted, the dark web hosted almost 60,000 unique onion domains, and around 57% of them hosted illegal content.
Let’s move on from the dark market.
Hacking isn’t all about criminal masterminds and cybersecurity. Sometimes it’s fun, and I have a list for you.
Curious Hacks
Not all cyber attacks are malicious or vicious. Hackers have a wicked sense of humor.
29. Operation Cupcake
(Source: Washington Post)
In 2011 MI6 took down the instructions for bomb-making from an online al-Qaeda magazine and replaced them with recipes for cake. I guess the Taliban didn’t fall for it since there were no exploding muffins in the last eight years.
30. #Lil’ Trump
(Source: Eonline)
This is one of the hacking facts I’ll cherish in my memory. In 2013 Donald Trump’s Twitter account was hacked, and the hacker posted some Lil’ Wayne lyrics.
31. Thunderstruck
(Source: Daily Mail)
In 2012, Iran’s nuclear facilities were under cyberattack. The hackers forced workers at two of the nuclear facilities to listen to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck repeatedly at full volume. Even if you’re a fan, it can still annoy you at some point.
32. Friendless Samy
(Source: YouTube)
In 2005 Samy Kamkar took down MySpace. For our younger readers, MySpace was a social network like Facebook, only cooler. If someone shuts down Facebook now, it would be one of the biggest hacks of the year. However, Samy didn’t want to shut down MySpace. All he wanted was…some friends. To achieve his dream he wrote a worm, exploiting a vulnerability in MySpace. Infected profiles became “friends” to Samy’s page. And then their friends as well and so on. It took Samy a day to get a million friends on his page. MySpace couldn’t take it.
33. The first hack
(Source: TheAtlantic)
In 1903 Guglielmo Marconi (the father of modern radio) was ready to transmit a message via the first wireless broadcasting technology. It used the same system as the telegraph. When he was prepared to send the message, the apparatus began to tap out a message in Morse code. The word was “RATS”, repeated over and over again.
The first of the many hacking cases to appear in history happened because the radio’s channel wasn’t as private as Marconi thought. More than a century later and after incredible technological advances we still face similar problems.
Conclusion
Well, that’s all folks. I hope you found this article helpful and interesting. We learned some cool facts together and we saw the world of hackers is not just about money. Curiosity and ethics play a large role as well.
Stay safe out there.
