Cyber Crime: Staggering Stats
[T]he cost of global cybercrime: $114 billion annually. Based on the value victims surveyed placed on time lost due to their cybercrime experiences, an additional $274 billion was lost With 431 million adult victims globally in the past year and at an annual price of $388 billion globally based on financial losses and time lost,cybercrime costs the world significantly more than the global black market in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined ($288 billion).(Emphasis added)
More on the cost of cybercrime.
I know how thoroughly irritating it is to catch a bogus antivirus malware program. I had one that continually warned me that my computer was under attack (which I suppose was actually true). I would delete it only to have it reinstall every time I rebooted my computer. I had to buy and download multiple anti-malware programs and run them simultaneously in order to finally eradicate it from my hard drive.
The study was published by Norton, so it may have been exaggerated just a teensy bit.
However, there is a very real cost to cyber crime. In my readings, the most interesting finding is that it’s not the computers that are usually the weakest link. It’s the operators. We’d all do ourselves a major favor if we doubled the length of our passwords and stopped writing them on sticky notes near our computers.
And yet we tolerate cyber crime because we feel powerless to stop it. Is it prosecuted as aggressively as drug smuggling?