Cybercrime could cost the global economy $575 billion every year, according to a report by McAfee. Although difficult to determine precisely, this number was derived from a study that McAfee performed using publicly available data from individual countries, along with interviews with government officials and experts.
Countries with higher income lost more money as a percentage of gross domestic product, although this could be either because those countries keep better records or because the intellectual property is more valuable in those countries. They could also simply be bigger targets because of the many major companies that exist in those countries. The country most affected by cybercrime was Germany, with 1.6 percent of gross domestic product affected. The U.S. suffered a 0.64 percent loss in GDP, while China came in third with a 0.63 percent GDP loss.
Examples of Intellectual Property] theft include the theft by cyberattackers of Adobe's code for ColdFusion and Photoshop. This was first reported in 2013, according to The Verge. The usernames and passwords for 38 million active Adobe users were stolen in that breach as well.
The Costs of Cybercrime
The price of cybercrime for 60 different organizations fell between $1.3 million to $58 million per company, according to a study by Ponemon Institute. Additionally, most attacks are caused by denial of service attacks, by people on the inside of the system and through Web-based attacks like phishing. The biggest costs are the theft of information, rather than the costs of business disruption.
The cost of the crimes can vary by the size of the organization. Larger organizations generally have to pay more for the effects of cybercrime. Additionally, companies in any industry can be a victim of cybercrime. There is no safe place where hackers have not looked.
The most expensive parts of cybercrime, according to the study, are detecting the attack and recovering from it. It is far cheaper to prevent attacks through proper security measures than to pay for an attack that has successfully breached a system.
The study additionally found that paying for prevention services goes a long way to preventing cyberattacks. The more security that protected a system, the less costly were the effects of cyberattacks. Ponemon Institute reported there is a major return on investment for those companies that have installed security systems and a team of IT security experts.
