Companies Still Undervalue Cyber Threats

Although there is an increased requirement with the government compliances and the wide availability of security products, yet, organizations continue to underrate the threats from data loss, phishing, and cyber vulnerabilities, said David DeWalt, CEO of McAfee while speaking at the InformationWeek 500 Conference in Tucson on September 18, 2007. InformationWeek reported this on September 18, 2007.

While delivering a keynote address at the conference, DeWalt expressed surprise at how both corporate executives and government officials were thinly aware of cyber threats. Considering the world flattened, threats has emerged in a significant amount from cyber criminals who have increased sophistication in their attacks on companies and enterprises all over the world.

DeWalt cited some major companies such as Citigroup, Bank of America and Ameritrade who recently have been victims of corporate data theft. He said that cyber crime was no less than $105 Billion business, surpassing the value of illegal drug transactions worldwide.

The additional $5 Billion provides foundation to this story. The figure appears to be the end result of some laborious assessment of global Internet crime revenues till the last billion. But no such assessment had taken place. Since the past two years, the $105 Billion amount had been bouncing around media like a check gone bad. The tech press including InformationWeek and security experts had silently debunked the figure even as mainstream media nourishes it.

Speaking at the IT Security World Conference in San Francisco in the third week of September 2007, Chief Security Officer for AT&T, Ed Amoroso, said that ever since the 1990s inept attacks, cyber crime has graduated to such higher levels that they could disrupt entire networks of the government, as per the report by sfgate.com.

Mr. Amoroso said that this is a wake up call about the probable danger of cyber crime while noting that many computer skilled people could access the technology and use it to commit severely damaging crime.

The data loss around the world now amounted to almost $39.99 Billion in losses to the affected individuals and companies every year. But law enforcement agencies have not been able to keep pace with it to detect, prosecute, and penalize criminals lurking in cyber space.

Related article: Companies Should Report Cybercrime

» SPAMfighter News - 10/6/2007