This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – Feb. 4, 2026
Cybersecurity Ventures publishes a chart at RansomwareCost.com containing our calculations of global ransomware damage cost predictions from 2015 to 2031.
For this year, 2026, we predict that ransomware costs will reach $74 billion annually. The 2026 calculation breaks down to $6.2 billion per month, $1.42 billion per week, $203 million per day, $8.5 million per hour, $141,000 per minute, and $2,400 per second.
Our first ever prediction, for 2015, put the annual cost of ransomware at $325 million. Another way to look at it is that we predict ransomware will cost the world more than $20 billion per month in 2031, up from $20 billion per year in 2021.
Ransomware costs include ransom negotiations and payouts, damage and destruction of data, stolen money, downtime, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, reputational harm, legal costs, and potentially, regulatory fines.
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