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The often-quoted figure that cybercrime costs the world close to $600 billion a year is a historical estimate from a 2018 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report produced in partnership with McAfee—not a newly measured 2026 total. CSIS said the amount was nearly 1% of global GDP. A 2026 paper offers a different composite estimate of about $500 billion annually, but its broad uncertainty range and narrower scope make the two figures unsuitable for a simple year-to-year comparison.
Where the $600 billion figure comes from
CSIS published Economic Impact of Cybercrime on February 21, 2018, in partnership with McAfee. The report, whose author was CSIS senior adviser James Andrew Lewis, concluded that close to $600 billion—nearly 1% of global GDP—was lost to cybercrime each year. That is the report’s estimate at the time, not a current-year accounting. Read the CSIS report page.
The same CSIS page said its estimate was up from about $445 billion in a 2014 study. The figures indicate the scale of the problem as estimated in those reports; they do not by themselves establish how much costs rose, since estimates can use different data and methods.
Why estimates differ
Cybercrime costs are not a single directly observed bill. An estimate depends on which victims and losses are counted, how national or survey data are scaled, and whether the calculation includes response and defense spending as well as direct losses. Costs that are difficult to quantify can also be omitted.
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CISA’s 2024 study summarizes the 2018 estimate as $600 billion, or 0.8% of global GDP, rather than CSIS’s “nearly one percent.” It also tabulates earlier CSIS/McAfee estimates with differing ranges. This variation in presentation is a reminder to retain each figure’s source, date, and method instead of treating rounded percentages as exact or interchangeable. See CISA’s 2024 study.
How the 2026 estimate compares
A 2026 paper by Lukošiūtė, Halstead, and Righetti surveyed 27 existing estimates and formed a composite estimate of approximately $500 billion per year. It reports a 90% confidence interval of $100 billion to $1 trillion, a wide range that signals substantial uncertainty rather than a precise global total.
The paper combines three approaches: a UK business victimization survey scaled globally, US individual victimization data scaled globally, and global cybersecurity spending figures. Its focus is quantifiable direct losses, response costs, and defense spending. It excludes harder-to-measure intellectual-property theft and reputational damage. The paper is an arXiv preprint, not a settled official measurement of worldwide costs. Read the 2026 paper.
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How to read the headline figure
- Date: The close-to-$600-billion figure describes the estimate published in 2018; it is not a 2026 measurement.
- Scale: CSIS characterized it as nearly 1% of global GDP, while CISA later presented it as 0.8%.
- Scope: The 2026 paper explicitly leaves out some difficult-to-measure impacts, including intellectual-property theft and reputational damage.
- Uncertainty: The 2026 paper’s interval spans $100 billion to $1 trillion, so its central estimate should not be mistaken for a narrow or exact count.
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