From: Forbes
Kate Vinton, Forbes Staff
What is the global cost of crime? According to a study released Monday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and McAfee, the figure could be as low as $375 billion or as high as $575 billion annually. While both numbers are staggeringly large, the wide variation of cost estimates points to a troubling issue in cybersecurity today: a lack of data breach reporting and transparency.
The CSIS/McAfee report itself spends some time detailing how the lack of complete or accurate records about security breaches impacted the creation of the report, noting that most cybercrime is not reported. (For example, the report mentions that when Google was hacked in 2010, 34 other Fortune 500 companies were also impacted, but only one company besides Google admitted to being hacked.) Outside of the United States, the report is missing data from various countries around the world, most conspicuously in the developing world where cybersecurity data is often not collected at all.
The lack of a complete data set coupled with the difficulty of quantifying the economic loss associated with cybercrime makes it easier to understand why the report presents such a wide range in estimated costs. At the presentation of the report at CSIS on Monday, panelist James Andrew Lewis reiterated that “many nations don’t produce good data and some don’t produce any data.”
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