14 DAY TRIAL // A new McAfee report authored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reveals that US organizations suffer losses of up to $100 billion (€75 billion) each year because of malicious cyber activities. This translates into over 500,000 lost jobs.
“Using figures from the Commerce Department on the ratio of exports to U.S. jobs, we arrived at a high-end estimate of 508,000 U.S. jobs potentially lost from cyber espionage,” said James Lewis, director and senior fellow, technology and public policy program at CSIS, and a co-author of the report.
“As with other estimates in the report, however, the raw numbers might tell just part of the story. The effect of the net loss of jobs could be small, but if a good portion of these jobs were high-end manufacturing jobs that moved overseas because of intellectual property losses, the effect could be wide ranging.”
According to the study, which McAfee claims to be the first to accurately estimate the damage caused by cybercrime, on a global scale, the losses can be as high as $1 trillion (€750 billion) per year.
In comparison, global losses caused by drug trafficking reach around $600 billion (€454 billion) per year.
The results of the study are based on factors such as loss of intellectual property, cybercrime, loss of sensitive business information, reputational damage, opportunity costs, and the additional costs of securing networks, insurance, and recovery.
“We believe the CSIS report is the first to use actual economic modeling to build out the figures for the losses attributable to malicious cyber activity,” said Mike Fey, executive vice president and chief technology officer at McAfee.
“Other estimates have been bandied about for years, but no one has put any rigor behind the effort. As policymakers, business leaders and others struggle to get their arms around why cyber security matters, they need solid information on which to base their actions.”