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Data theft "cost a trillion US dollars"
INSECURITY outfit McAfee has told the World Economic Forum that data theft cost the world a trillion US dollars and if more work was not done to buy its products the figure could get worse.
The figures were based on a survey of 800 chief information officers in Japan, China, India, Brazil, Britain, Dubai, Germany and the United States and the outfit claims the trillion bucks is a conservative estimate.
The companies surveyed estimated they lost a combined $4.6 billion worth of intellectual property last year alone, and spent approximately $600 million repairing damage from data breaches. McAfee took the numbers, added a few noughts and projected that companies worldwide lost more than $1 trillion last year.
According to the scaremongering firm, "As the global recession continues and legitimate work disappears, desperate job seekers or "cyber moles" are stealing valuable corporate data."
Scaremongering is big business and the security industry is booming. Despite what some commentators are calling a global recession the industry will be worth, ooh, at least a few trillion dollars this year, a bloke in the pub estimated. µ
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Had they used some more realistic number I would have listened, but this amount of loss from data breaches in one year is practically impossible. I seriously doubt that 2% of the world economy is lost every year due to data breaches.
There's also an article at:
http://opensource.org/node/384
written by Michael Tiemann of Red Hat, saying that by switching to Free Software the world could save that much, and part of the saving he projected was not needing Anti-Virus etc. from McAfee. Of course they wouldn't mention that not using Windows would save a lot, after all, if you don't use Windows, you don't have to buy from McAfee.
Or are you just a troll ?
Really, what we have is an anti-virus company putting up figures that try to scare people into supporting its bottom line. Critical thinking requires that one take a step back and engage the brain before taking everything at face value.
McAffee is not a research company, nor is it a market evaluation company - meanwhile Forrester or even Gartner have a tendancy of making fools of themselves and these guys are supposed to be pros.
Besides, these figures just have to be rubbish. A trillion for data theft, a hundred trillion for malware, soon there won't be any money left to do business.
Well, as usual from Inq this has to be a funny article...
Why? Well, I agree that many zillions of dollars are lost by IT criminal activities. But I believe that more money are lost by ,,cough" other activities and just reported to be stolen by hackers...
It's so convenient... you don't have to burn papers to hide your incompetence or bad thinking.
IMHO if you take good care about your data (as you care about your pocket) you can't lose...
curious that they were only interested in how much money was lost due to leaked data, they didnt ask how much money was made by pinching data from other companies, im certain the net loss would be a hell of a lot lower!
1 trillion bucks is an average 160$ per person in the world... including newborns, old farts (like myself) and all those people who have no electronic data to steal... Also, not everyone gets his/her data stolen, let's assume it's one in 5, one in 6 (and that's WHOLE lot!).... that makes a 800-1000$ for robbed person.
Now, those data may as well be objective, but IHMO there are more productive ways to use 'em rather than report them....
I love when hacks who have nothing to support their beliefs other than their baseless opinion, are quick to disparage sources who have a lot of objective data to work from.
You can count on some at the Inquirer to slant the news to appease their egos in spite of reality.
Most spyware takes up less system resources than McAfee.
Seriously though, i have cleaned up plenty of pcs for people over the years on the side. The majority got infected badly while running either McAfee or Norton. Or, the software itself was bringing the system down. How these two companies stay in business and continue to get decent reviews is beyond me. I would not use them if they were free.
<puts
" I shall call him ... Mini-McAfee! "