Panda Security Insight

One of the questions I am often asked by the international media during interviews is the amount of losses caused by cyber-crime (they love figures). I always reply that no one really knows the exact figure.

I read an article posted by John Leyden in The Register about the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) today. IC3 is an organization supported by the FBI, which has published its annual report on Internet crime in the U.S. It is a partial, but highly-representative report. One of its conclusions is that online crime complaints have increased by 22.3% since 2008 and 667% since 2001.

The financial losses caused by the crimes whose complaints were filed through IC3 amount to 560 million dollars, as opposed to 265 million in 2008. As for the classification and ranking of the complaints received throughout 2009, it is as follows:

As written by Brian Krebs, 9.5 million dollars were stolen from physical banks in the US in the last quarter of 2009, approximately 40 million dollars a year, or 50 to round it up. The comparison between online and physical theft worldwide is a revealing factor as to the size of the organized cyber-mafia business.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, not all fraud victims or users who lose money due to cyber-crime file a complaint, either because they are unaware of the situation or because they do not know where to go. Secondly, this report reflects complaints made through the IC3 website, and therefore excludes complaints made to banks, local or national authorities, etc. Finally, the report only reflects the situation in one part of the U.S….

However, this report is a clear indicator of the scale of the business. Without intending to go into the argument of inter-country/inter-authority collaboration and the need to pursue cyber-crime, I would like to finish this reflection with an image borrowed from P.C. Vey which we use in our presentations and which accurately represents the present situation:

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