NBC

Cybercriminals Hacked 1.1 Billion Accounts Last Year: Study

"The bad guys made a lot of money last year," said Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response

Digital bandits breached 1.1 billion identities in 2016, nearly doubling their haul from the year before, according to a new study on cybercrime.

NBC News reports that the year brought more ransomware attacks and higher extortion demands, plus some of the biggest distributed denial of service attacks ever seen, causing "unprecedented levels of disruption" to internet traffic, according to the 2017 Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec.

"The bad guys made a lot of money last year," said Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response. "They keep getting better and more efficient at what they do; they managed to fool us in new and different ways."

Cybercriminals are moving away from making money by stealing a little bit from a lot of people at a time, and toward attacking banks themselves, the reported noted. 

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