back to article Cyber crime now bigger than the drugs trade

The global cost of cybercrime is greater than the combined effect on the global economy of trafficking in marijuana, heroin and cocaine, which is estimated at $388bn, a new headline-grabbing study reported. The Norton Cybercrime Report puts the straight-up financial costs of cyberattacks worldwide at $114bn, with time lost …

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  1. Chad H.
    Joke

    In other news

    The office of overblown statictics reported that a record each day are subjected to hyperbolic statistics with no real value "Its over a billion people per day" a spokesperson said "This is bigger than Cybercrime AND Manchester United combined!"

  2. Mike 140
    FAIL

    Bears, wood etc.

    Security firm says you must buy a security product.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    Poor alarmist comparison

    I would say that the illicit drugs trade "earns" $388bn, in doing its job of providing consenting_adults_in_private with whatever substances they enjoy using.

    There are "costs" involved, these are almost entirely used to pay for the army of career-prohibitionists. This sum has not been evaluated, but there is now a vociferous lobby to keep it going, even to increase the dose, as it were.

    This is an astonishing amount of money to spend on what is essentially a weakly-supportable moral argument over what individuals are allowed to do in private.

    It is not even remotely comparable to the costs of computer malware.

    1. LaeMing
      Flame

      Keep in mind....

      The drugs trade has a huge stake in keeping the stuff illegal, and hence costly. Biggest supporters of any sort of prohibition are the prohibited product's suppliers. Second biggest are the dupes that unwittingly support them.

  4. Ru
    Facepalm

    "time lost dealing with the crime"

    Well, were I particularly cynical, I might equate that with the good old 'street value' associated with drug busts, eg a work of almost total fiction.

    I wonder when it will be standard practise to make your websites resistant against the most trivial SQL injection or XSS or XSRF attacks. These guys seem to think there's a multi-hundred-billion dollar market out there for people who write software that isn't intrinsically shit, but for some reason no-one is trying to profit from it. Quelle surprise.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Bears, Popes, woods, etc....

    Stuff that our business relies on, that you need to be scared off, is on the rise and is getting bigger every day!

  6. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Meh

    0

    What's the difference between cyber security vendors and scammers?

    hint: see title.

  7. mark l 2 Silver badge

    fake website and ebay fraud

    Do this figure include fraud from fake website or ebay selling counterfeit goods or tickets that never arrive as this seems like an easy way for scammers to make easy money these days and i know several people who have been scammed by it.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In related news...

    The Myselfandi Commission puts the cost of time wasted by bored IT workers reading articles about idiotic made up figures at eleventy-trillion dollars! An hour!

  9. Graham Cluley
    Alert

    Lest we forget..

    Anyone else remember The Register's 2009 article: "'Cybercrime exceeds drug trade' myth exploded"?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/27/cybercrime_mythbusters/

  10. veti Silver badge
    Boffin

    The smell test

    A million victims a day?

    Okay, there are, give or take, 7 billion people in the world. Let's suppose half of these have Internet access. Then your chance of being scammed online, per year, is (365/3500 = about 10.5%).

    So in the past five years, almost 50% of the people around you should have been victims of "cybercrime". Does that sound plausible?

    Well, maybe if you stretch the definition a bit. If marginally misrepresenting something on eBay counts as "cybercrime", or if visiting a website that's been defaced by vandals makes you a "victim", then I could maybe believe that statistic. So what will Norton sell me to protect me from these outrages?

    Yeah, right.

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