Cybercrime costs businesses N147trn in 2008 – McAfee

Global business community lost about $1 trillion, about N148,700,000,148,396, to cyber criminals, especially on intellectual property and expenditures for repairing associated damages, according to a study by anti-virus entity, McAfee.

The study by McAfee made this projection based on responses to a survey of more than 800 chief information officers in the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil and Dubai.

The respondents estimated that they lost data worth a total of $4.6bn (N684bn) and spent about $600m cleaning up after breaches, McAfee said.

The report, entitled ‘Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information’ was released Thursday at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

It also finds that developing countries spend more money on protecting intellectual property than companies in Western countries.

According to respondents, the ongoing recession is only increasing the security risk for corporations, with 42 per cent reporting that displaced workers were the biggest threat to sensitive information on the network.

There were some other interesting geographical-related results, even as over one quarter of the respondents said they avoid storing data in China, and 47 per cent of the Chinese respondents said they believed the US poses the biggest security threat to their data.


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