ROME: The global cost of cybercrime topped $6 trillion last year, as the coronavirus pandemic caused online activity to soar, the head of Italian defence, security and aerospace giant Leonardo said Tuesday.

“New cybersecurity threats over the last two years have been a ‘collateral damage’ of the Covid-19 pandemic and the acceleration of digitalisation it induced,” Alessandro Profumo said at the opening of the Cybertech Europe 2022 conference in Rome.

“Cyberattacks have grown in number, sophistication and impact — in 2021 the global cost of cybercrime exceeded $6 trillion.”

Leonardo said the figures came from Clusit, the Italian association for information security, which had cited a report from US group Cybersecurity Ventures. Clusit estimated a loss of $1 trillion in 2020.