Cyber crime losses = 40 Billion $!
In an interview Mr Sivarama Krishnan, Executive Director, PwC which had conducted the Economic Crime Survey 2006 stated that according to estimates the global losses due to cybercrime could be pegged at close to 40 billion $. He also expressed his views on how to combat cyber crime in organisations and what are the steps in preventing cybercrime.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
What is cyber crime? Who are the victims? And who are the perpetrators?
Cyber crime is a term used to broadly describe criminal activity in which computers or computer networks are a tool, a target, or a place of criminal activity and include everything from electronic cracking to denial of service attacks. It is also used to include traditional crimes in which computers or networks are used to enable the illicit activity.
Cyber-attacks can be malicious or accidental; can involve attacks by other nations, organised groups, or individuals; and can be motivated by monetary gain, ill-will, political interests, or curiosity. Victims and perpetrators can be anyone and everyone. Perpetrators can be anyone, such as disgruntled employees, teenagers, hackers and business rivals. And victims can include companies, employees, students, etc.
How widespread is the crime — in India and the world over? Any numbers on the possible loss suffered as a result?
Expert feels that only a tiny proportion of cyber crime incidents are actually reported world over. However, as per estimates losses due to cyber crime can be as high as $40 billion. Individual users are more exposed to computer crime than ever, due to the growth in identity theft.
In India, cyber crime cases registered are less compared to the the US, Europe, etc. The Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) 2006 ranks the US (60.9 per cent) as first amongst the nations in hosting perpetrators followed by the UK (15.9 per cent). As per the IC3 results, Internet auction fraud is the most frequently reported online crime, accounting for 44.9 per cent of the total complaints. Seventy-five per cent of US IT executives surveyed said some of the threat to their corporate security came from inside their own organisations, while 84 per cent believed that criminal hacker groups were increasingly replacing isolated hackers as the perpetrators of cyber crime.
Click here to read the entire interview
Well from my personal experience i can say that even the mumbai cyber crime cell isn’t equipped or they are just plain ignorant or lazy at handling cyber crimes and i say this because last year when i had called them up with regards to the UTI phishing website that i had uncovered I got a reply saying just ignore the site!
But it seems now even the indian press has started to make a note of the online crime taking place and affecting companies. In this article companies acknowledge the threat posed by phishing and its impact on their businesses. Here’s hoping that such crimes are better tackled in the days ahead and not many people burn their fingers which surfing the not so safe cyberworld.
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