14 DAY TRIAL // The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released today a report aiming at estimating the general impact of cybercrime.
Sponsored by Intel’s McAfee, the document is an overview of multiple economical aspects stemming from illegal digital activities, from the losses suffered by the direct victims to the impact on companies, national economies and the costs required to fight the threats.
The report paints a grim picture on personal privacy, estimating that more than 800 million individual records have fallen into the wrong hands in 2013.
Furthermore, CSIS informs that “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” had private details stolen.
It appears that the cybercriminals are not too efficient at turning all these details into financial gains, but even so, the overall costs increase as victims often have to pay for “recovery costs” that occur after a digital attack.
An example is Italy, where a study was conducted and found that the recovery costs amounted to $8.5 billion (6,254 billion EUR) for a total of $875 million (~644 million EUR) in direct losses. The difference is so steep because restoring the trust in the brand and reputation of a company is neither easy nor cheap.
As far as the global loss figure is concerned, the study cannot provide reliable data but gives an annual loss of $575 billion (423 billion EUR) as the most dire estimation, taking into consideration high-income countries; the more optimistic is set around $375 billion (~276 billion EUR), based on open-source data, which is more likely to be incomplete.
Difficulty in making an estimation closer to reality is also due to the fact that the value of intellectual property is not easy to quantify. For instance, “press reports suggest that intrusion into an American advanced fighter aircraft program led to cost increases in the tens of millions of dollars and delays as software was rewritten or replaced.”
Because of incomplete data, the truth could be somewhere in the middle or even more optimistic than described by the McAfee-sponsored document; but even so, the figures are not to be neglected as cybercrime has not reached its peak, yet.
According to the report, international cooperation and public/private partnerships are essential in reducing the losses generated by cybercrime, as seen in the international effort to take down the GameOver Zeus botnet.
More than 500,000 computers were part of the botnet and the criminals managed to cash in millions of dollars before law enforcement gained control over their servers; losses are estimated to exceed the $100 million (73,570 million EUR) mark in US alone.