Cybercrime Remains Growth Industry With $445B Lost

It is pretty damn sad that cybercrime is one of the fastest growing industries on the planet.

That’s the main message from former U.S. intelligence officials, who in a report today outlined scenarios for how $445 billion a year in trade theft due to computer hackers will worsen. They warned that financial companies, retailers and energy companies are at risk from thieves who are becoming more sophisticated at pilfering data from their servers.

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They're just lumping all their estimations together to say "we lost this much in tax dollars!" essentially. Cybercrime covers just about everything.. from MPAA, to the movie industry, to hacked data, etc.

Weird how cybercrime keeps going up as our society keeps demanding we surrender all privacy and information to various sources. Couldn't be a connection, could there?

It's Google's fault somehow.

Only 2 ways to detour crime like this, either increase the likelihood of caught, or increase the penalty.

As long as the likelihood of getting caught running a botnet or breaking into some companies systems is low, and even if you get caught the punishment is minimal, these crimes will continue. I think a few public executions of these hackers would help.

nutzo said:

Only 2 ways to detour crime like this, either increase the likelihood of caught, or increase the penalty.

As long as the likelihood of getting caught running a botnet or breaking into some companies systems is low, and even if you get caught the punishment is minimal, these crimes will continue. I think a few public executions of these hackers would help.

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The problem is it's so easy to stay anonymous and/or have multiple layers between the true perpetrators of the crime, as well as them being in unfriendly jurisdictions to the US. You'll have a mid-level person using TOR and all kinds of other anonymous browsing devices hiring mules to hire mules.

There are also so many fraud schemes going on, how do you know which one to target, which one is actually high value enough to spend the hundreds or thousands of man hours on, plus working with foreign agencies on extradition? Is the recent spate of fraud victims all one scheme, or a dozen different ones?

It's a fucked up ecosystem, and coming from a background of banking fraud, I'm still shocked that in the banking world it still isn't that much of a priority. The thing is, even with all these huge losses being thrown around, the banks are still raking in substantially more in interchange fees.

Crime targets the vehicle of transactions. Before the internet, bandits would raid trains, it's just now there are no epic horse riding to board the train to rob it.

Except now you can rob the train with no physical risk to yourself, no witnesses and can rob 10 million trains simultaneously.

nutzo said:

Only 2 ways to detour crime like this, either increase the likelihood of caught, or increase the penalty.

As long as the likelihood of getting caught running a botnet or breaking into some companies systems is low, and even if you get caught the punishment is minimal, these crimes will continue. I think a few public executions of these hackers would help.

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the only factor that will have a deterrent effect is certainty of being caught. severity, aside from the fact that we are already the most punitive country in the Western democratic countries and it hasn't reduced crime, doesn't seem to have much impact on reducing crime. We have a lot of crime, but not because judges/laws are lenient, but because most people don't get caught, don't get reported for their crimes, and don't get arrested. Once someone is caught or reported for a crime, and manages to get caught and hauled before a judge, most of the time they end up doing a significant amount of time for a whole lot of offenses. And most of the time criminals aren't the best at thinking out the consequences of their actions and either have mental illness or are intoxicated/drugs/young and aren't particularly rational anyway.

It's still a drop in the bucket given how much our economy is worth.

I would be concerned with the rates of increase as opposed to the static figure.