Cybercrime costs $388 billion dollars in annual losses globally and it affected almost 7 in 10 adults last year.
This week Norton is released the results of the Norton Cybercrime Report 2011, a study on the impact of cybercrime that included a survey of over 12,000 adults in 24 countries. This provides an important and accurate picture of the scope of cybercrime globally and the results are shocking! Every day of the past year, over 1 million online adults in 24 countries experienced cybercrime. This can also be broken down to 50,000 victims per hour, 820 victims per minute, or 14 victims every second. In just the last 12 months 44% of people have been a victim of cybercrime while only 15% have been a victim of physical crime in the same period.
I regularly meet with law enforcement who are fighting cybercrime. The above statistics clearly illustrate the biggest challenge faced by law enforcement—the enormous scope of the problem. With so many victims in many different countries, police can successfully stop one cybercriminal but still be left with thousands of more cases. The police do a great job trying to stop cybercrime but the problem requires significantly more resources than are currently being devoted to stop it.
Only 21% of people in the Norton study reported the cybercrime to law enforcement. This also creates a significant problem for police and prosecutors. Some prosecutors will only accept cases that exceed a certain amount of victims or high level of damages. US law allows federal prosecutors to combine multiple victims into a common case if the crime is linked. This is critical in many cybercrime cases where there may be a small number of victims who have lost a relatively small amount individually. However, failure to report cybercrime prevents law enforcement from effectively addressing the problem.
Finally, the key message of this report is one of hope. Despite the really frightening statistics on the scale of cybercrime, cybercrime is still largely a preventable crime. Globally the three most common reported forms of cybercrime were viruses, online scams, and phishing attacks. All of these crimes are largely preventable by following good security practices and using updated security software. I have worked with crime victims in some capacity for over a decade now. Nobody wants to be a victim. The police are trying to help but it is an extremely rare cybercrime case in which a victim actually recovers their lost money . Time dealing with cybercrime is also lost forever. It is far better to use good security software and follow careful safety steps online that can greatly reduce the likelihood of becoming one of the 7 in 10 global cybercrime victims last year.