Enterprises at Risk of Losing $1 Trillion in Data Theft

Security company McAfee Inc. recently released a report which states that businesses could lose more than $1 Trillion on account of theft or loss of data, or any other form of e-crime.

After surveying 800 business organizations from eight different countries, the security company discovered that malware threats increased 400% during 2008, with 80% of them targeted at making financial gains.

The report also reveals that businesses worldwide might have lost more than $4.6 Billion worth of intellectual property during 2008 while they spent $600 Million in mending the damages.

Many organizations among those surveyed indicated that they were concerned about the knock-on impact of the ongoing financial turmoil. 42% of respondents said that the greatest threat as a result of the economic recession was employees made redundant, while about 39% said that critical information had greater risk of being compromised in the present scenario than it had been in earlier times. Besides, more than one-third of respondents said that their greatest concern was safeguarding intellectual property from being stolen.

Moreover, over 25% of respondents stated that they would not maintain a database in China, while 47% of the respondents in China said they considered US as the greatest threat to the security of their data.

Greg Day, Security Analyst at McAfee, said that most research analysts included 'information security' among the three greatest concerns of companies for 2009. They are laying more emphasis on the significance of safety for information economies, as reported by ihotdesk on January 29, 2009.

Further, China, India and Brazil are allocating more money for IT security than Japan, Germany, UK and US, according to the research. However, the former nations are poorly reputed as far as investigating of IT security incidents is concerned, and might also be too relaxed at implementing laws and regulations.

Citing some incidents of data theft in Britain, the report notes there has been repeated compromise of people's data from the HM Revenue and Customs. Additionally, in the end week of January 2009, the job site Monster.co.uk was hacked and perpetrators stole 4.5 Million people's personal information, the greatest e-crime ever committed in the UK.

Related article: Enterprising Hackers Commercialize Their Activities

» SPAMfighter News - 2/14/2009