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McAfee Regrets "Flawed" Trillion Dollar Cyber Crime Claims
Techy77 writes "McAfee's chief technology officer Mike Fey has admitted that he regrets his own company's estimates, which once pinned global losses from cyber crime at more than $1 trillion. From the article: 'A more recent report commissioned by the security company, and released last month, reduced those estimates to as low as $US300 billion globally, but specifically noted the difficulty of determining exactly how much companies, governments and individuals could lose if subject to an attack. “It’s very difficult to put a dollar figure on it,” Mr Fey said. “When you meet an engineer that has spent a good chunk of his life working on some innovation and it’s stolen overnight, you get a good feeling for what [intellectual property] loss means. It is the shift in a moment’s instance from an innovative company set strategically, to loss. It becomes difficult for that company to invest in innovation."'"
Wow, an article about McAffee Inc and not McAfee the loon. Well done Slashdot!
Let me paraphrase: "Sorry, we were all sniffing really freaky McAfee-brand bath salts while we came up with that number"
So, numbers reported about a threat were inflated by an entity who profits off the perception of that threat.
Gee, I'm totally shocked at this. Nobody would ever put out alarmist numbers.
Part of me suspects that someone knew at the time these numbers were crap, but decided they made for a good story and went with them.
Assholes.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I have yet to meet an independent engineer who has had work stolen by someone who commits the type of cyber crime that McAfee claims to protect from.
I have met individuals who claim to have had their life's work stolen by corporations, who subsequently patent it and then troll on the patent.
Small companies and corporations seem like more likely targets of that claim, and the perpetrators are likely larger companies....imho.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
Since McAfee is an Intel subsidiary claims like this should have a law, the Moore or Less law.
If you are worried about people stealing your intellectual property, don't have any intellectual property.
There already is a solution for that AND it gives you the advantage of using the code of all those others that were working on innovations.
Dear management: Next time you send us on some forced team building where we learn how a team is better then an individual: come with us and listen.
Now apply this to other things as well, like multiple companies. Suddenly we are a team working on a solution.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"The real problem was due to the exchange rate," he said. "We actually estimated losses at over 25 Bitcoins."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It becomes difficult for that company to invest in innovation.
So a company fears that their precious IP will be stolen so they stop "innovating," boohoo. Nobody cares, there are 5 billion of us and somebody somewhere will continue to invent and create. 100 years from now nobody will say "if only those thieves hadn't discouraged ZYX Inc. from innovating, we'll all have flying cars now."
When you meet an engineer that has spent a good chunk of his life working on some innovation and it’s stolen overnight...
...then someone else wins, reducing the global losses. Also, it's horrible to try to calculate "losses" from this reasoning. So Xerox executives getting outwitted by the Apple folks regarding GUI also counts as "a global loss"?
Ezekiel 23:20
That's one hundred trillion dollars! (with Dr. Evil pinkie)
but specifically noted the difficulty of determining exactly how much companies, governments and individuals could lose if subject to an attack. “It’s very difficult to put a dollar figure on it,” Mr Fey said.
So... why put a dollar figure on it? If the number is 4 trillion or 90 billion, what would be the difference in strategies that consumers and organizations should pursue in each case? Fey's language is so obviously just more marketdroid conjuration babble -- "Look! look over here at my right hand! Nothing in it at all! ."
The fact is, Mr. Fey, that the danger of security flaws isn't in the direct dollar amount of damage done by any single incursion, nor in the aggregate sum total of attacks to date. The danger of unsecured machines/networks is cost-neutral, because an unsecured machine/network necessarily implies an infinite relative cost to you -- that is, it is the state of being unsecured which is untenable, not the potential monetary loss. If your neighbor one night digs a trench through your yard and buries an extension cord spliced into your house's electrical power, does it really matter to you whether he is only plugging in his mp3 player to charge it once a week, versus running all his refrigerators and washing machines?
You cannot really put any dollar amount on someone else controlling part or all of your machine/network, because Access is not an object, it is a potentiality. A security hole is a hole is a hole. Patch it up regardless. If on September 10, 2001 some insurance actuary named Smith would have calculated the "loss" experienced in an airplane hijacking by determining the depreciated cost of the plane itself, any cargo it carried, the cost of compensatory marketing to restore consumer confidence, the earning potential of the passengers, etc. The next day, a bunch of black hat social engineering crackers capitalized on a long-unpatched security hole - Access to the cockpit - to pull off an exploit which had an eventual cost far exceeding our actuary's previous estimate by several factors of ten. (And that cost will continue to reverberate/multiply for decades to come.)
The focus on dollar value is simply Mr. Fey's way of opening the haggling process over how much his company wants to charge you. He knows that whatever number "industry experts" give will be quoted and repeated by our infotainment media and by other businesses/consultants wanting to stake their own claim in the network security gold rush. Once the notion enters public consciousness, well what's a $25,000/year enterprise license for software and security services to an individual company when faced with the "common sense" understanding that we're talking about great googly moogly-illions of dollars in Crime. So now he's simply been caught overestimating the number, which is expected in ANY good haggle. Now he's here to tell us "Okay, okay, because you're such a good friend, I'm going to roll it down to $300 billion -- special just for you!"
Don't constantly test and patch flaws because of some dollar amount reported by some "expert study" you read about. Constantly test and patch flaws because a good administrator takes care of business. The number is FUD, but your job is the same either way.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
As far as I'm concerned it is the bloated piled of McAfee that costs piles of money in lost productivity not to mention the number of embedded systems where the "Your subscription is running out" crap pops up on some jumbotron.
Trialware installs of McAfee and Norton AV are the number one reason I long ago told people to stop buying PCs with Windows on them. I don't really mind windows but I got sick of every relative begging for my help to remove all the bloatware for AV, music services, game services, etc that came with their "blank" machines. My windows buddies all say that the Microsoft AV tool is great (and free) so Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc aren't providing a service when they "offer" any of this bloatware.
I don't even like "removing" it as I don't feel that the result is a clean install. There are usually scars and grime left behind.
From the article:
So half the 1 Trillion figure is their own estimate of dollar income to themselves and their ilk...