A recent report estimates that the ”cost of cybercrime includes the effect of hundreds of millions of people having their personal information stolen—incidents in the last year include more than 40 million people in the US, 54 million in Turkey, 20 million in Korea, 16 million in Germany, and more than 20 million in China.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies and McAfee issued their June 2014 report entitled “Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime” with these comments about the impact on the world:
The report also has a chapter on acceptable losses which may come as a shock to many, but should not given these observations:
One way to think about the costs of cybercrime is that societies bear the cost of crime and loss as part of doing business and a tradeoff for convenience and efficiency. Companies and individuals have decided that the net gain of using automobiles and giant merchant ships outweigh the potential cost. The problem with these analogies is that many companies do not know the extent of their losses from cybercrime, leading them to make the wrong decisions about what is an acceptable loss.
Here is a list of the chapters in the report:
Estimating global loss from incomplete data
Regional variations
Incentives explain cybercrime’s growth
Acceptable loss from cybercrime
IP theft and innovation cannibalism
Penalty-free financial crime
Confidential business information and market manipulation
Opportunity cost and cybercrime
Recovery costs
Obviously cybercrime is huge, will never get smaller, and no one is immune