Cybercrime Now Worth $105 Billion, Bypasses Drug Trade

Stony Stevenson writes "Citing recent highly publicized corporate data breaches that have beset major companies like Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Bank of America, McAfee CEO David DeWalt, said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide. Despite the increase in government compliance requirements and the proliferation of security tools, companies continue to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, and other cyber vulnerabilities, DeWalt said. 'Worldwide data losses now represent US$40 billion in losses to affected companies and individuals each year, DeWalt says. But law enforcement's ability to find, prosecute, and punish criminals in cyberspace has not kept up: "If you rob a 7-11 you'll get a much harsher punishment than if you stole millions online," DeWal remarked. "The cross-border sophistication in tracking and arresting cyber-criminals is just not there."'"

Comments

Sounds scary

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Considering the international nature of the Internet and the ability to hack from just about anywhere, including extradition-free countries, it seems like anyone could become a cybercriminal and make billions of dollars.

Does O'Reilly or Manning have a book on how to become a cybercriminal? Besides the Camel, I mean.

This number

[symbolic]

...sounds like it was pulled out of someone's ass. I don't deny that there's a problem, but what concerns me is that this "number" could very well become another excuse for the government to pursue "solutions" that are even more invasive than our current crop of 9/11-related idiocy.

Re:This number

[rwyoder]

...sounds like it was pulled out of someone's ass.

Absolutely! When a thief robs a liquor store of $1000, he actually has the money, and the store has really lost the money. Now let me relay something I learned from a lecture I attended by a wekll-know former hacker a few years ago; He had used social engineering to obtain a copy of some cell-phone infrastructure s/w from a large, well-known high-tech company. He later learned that when the cops questioned the mgt of the company, they wanted a dollar amount of the damages. When the mgt hesitated about how to determine the damages, the cops asked: "So what did it cost to develop it?" And that was the number they used! The hacker had done nothing but use social engineering to persuade an employee to FedEx him a copy of the s/w which he kept, but did nothing with it. He never even broke into a single computer, nor ever distributed the s/w, nor did any kind of damage. But in their zeal to pump this up into a big case, the cops used the completely bogus multi-million dollar cost of the project and charged him with that dollar amount of (non-existent) damage.

This must mean...

[NeoSkink]

We're winning the drug war! That's the only way to explain such low numbers!

Maybe we'd better start a war on cyber crime too, seeing how the drug war has been so successful!