Average Cyber Loss Increases For U.S. Companies

Security Products (http://secprodonline.com/) and The Computer Security Institute (CSI) have a great article on increase of company losses due to cyber-crime.



Average Cyber Loss Increases For U.S. Companies

The Computer Security Institute (CSI) recently released its 2007 report with news that the average annual loss reported by U.S. companies in the 2007 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey more than doubled, from $168,000 in last year's report to $350,424 in this year's survey. This ends a five-year run of lower reported losses.

Financial fraud overtook virus attacks as the source of the greatest financial loss. Virus losses, which had been the leading cause of loss for seven straight years, fell to second place. Another significant cause of loss was system penetration by outsiders.

Additional key findings include:

Almost one-fifth of those respondents who suffered one or more kinds of security incident said they'd suffered a "targeted attack," i.e. a malware attack aimed exclusively at their organization or at organizations within a small subset of the general population.

Insider abuse of network access or e-mail (such as trafficking in pornography or pirated software) edged out virus incidents as the most prevalent security problem, with 59 percent and 52 percent of respondents reporting each respectively.

When asked generally whether they'd suffered a security incident, 46 percent of respondents said yes, down from 53 percent last year and 56 percent the year before.

Click here for the original article

- The Hackett Security Team