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Hackers Stole $172 Billion From People Last Year (symantec.com)
Yearly report published by security firm Norton estimates that as many as 978 million people in 20 countries lost money to cybercrime last year. On an average, the firm says, victims lost an average of $142 and spent nearly 24 hours dealing with the fallout of their attack.
Very detailed article. I'm impressed.
Although I do wonder, how much did they get away with and keep as opposed to get caught and got to jail?
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Nearly one in four believe stealing information online is not as bad as stealing property in ‘real life’
That depends entirely on what you mean by "information".
Believing that Disney et al 's hijacking of copyright to totally pervert the system from what the founders intended is a travesty that deserves civil disobedience is not a "contradictory belief" to also believing you shouldn't steal your neighbor's stuff.
You can go to prison for copying Steamboat Willie 90 years after it was published.
A lot of cybercrime is due to exploiting vulnerabilities in software. I find it amazing how buggy software really is, and that definitely contributes to the staggering amounts of cybercrime. It's frequently the result of poorly written software and poorly designed hardware. Every few days, I get notifications in Ubuntu that I need to install a new version of the Linux kernel because it's a security update, then I have to reboot my system. It's open source software, with supposedly large numbers of people contributing and reviewing the code. With all the people supposedly working on the Linux kernel, you'd think the developers would produce better code, and it wouldn't be necessary to constantly issue bug fixes for security holes. I'm just surprised and disappointed that Linux developers aren't writing better code that isn't full of bugs, which require updates every few days.