FBI Pegs Cyber-crime Cost at $67 Billion

Last year, cyber-crime caused $67 billion in damages in the US alone, as revealed in a report carried out by the FBI, which is reported in several publications including Vnunet.com and Government Technology.

The findings of the study carried out by the FBI were based on a poll of 2,066 organizations.

Nearly 90 percent of these organizations confirmed that they had experienced a security incident in the last twelve months and 20 percent of them have suffered 20 attacks or more.

As regards the financial impact of these incidents, 64 percent of respondents incurred average losses of 24,000 dollars per case.

The list of most common attacks is headed by viruses (83.7%), followed by spyware (79.5%). Over one in five of the organizations interviewed confirmed that they had suffered from port scan incidents and data sabotage.

Forty-four percent of intrusions reported by the companies interviewed by the FBI came from within the organization, which demonstrates the need to pay attention to the security of internal networks.