InfoWorld - Security Adviser: Cyber crime not a big deal? Get real

InfoWorld's Bill Snyder interprets a recent Microsoft report to mean that cyber crime stats are wildly inflated. If anything, those stats underestimate the problem

By Roger A. Grimes
APRIL 24, 2012

Perhaps you've read Bill Snyder's blog post based on a recent Microsoft paper disputing the high cost of cyber crime cited in many industry and vendor surveys. Unfortunately, I think too many people are taking the actually claims of the paper and expanding the conclusion to cover all cyber crime.

I don't want to debate the validity of the original paper's data or conclusions. I believe my knowledgeable colleagues may even be right that certain cyber crime surveys radically overstate the costs of cyber crime by relying on overly small sample sizes for a given population.

But I think too many readers of the previous writings came away with the idea that cyber crime may not be overly expensive to society. The narrative meme changed from "some surveys aren't accurate" to "cyber crime isn't that costly to our society in general." And that transition would be wrong. It would be like what some climate change opponents do by taking above average snowfall in one Alaskan region and arguing that one data point refutes all the other data points from all over the world that indicate otherwise.

I have no doubt that some surveys overstate the incident and damage of cyber crime. I also have no doubt that cost of cyber crime is very high and is a major impediment to advanced society.

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