Articles Tagged with ''cybercrime''

So you want to rob a bank; not saying you should, but... the “best” day is Friday, and the best time is between 9 and 11 a.m. So set your cellphone to an early wake-up call. Concentrate on a branch in a commercial section of the city. Go up to the teller counter and say your threat or hand over a note. Avoid an act of violence; only three percent of incidents of robbery, burglaries and larcenies resulted in violence in 2014. By the way, vastly more perpetrators are killed in a bank robbery compared to customers or employees.

The rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015. 

I recently interviewed Marc Goodman, founder of the Future Crimes Institute and author of the recently published book “Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It.” In his book, Goodman sets forth with great precision the frightening extent to which current and emerging technologies are harming national and corporate security, putting people’s lives at risk, eroding privacy, and even altering our perceptions of reality.

 Frankly, it’s costing U.S. businesses more than other nations’ enterprises worldwide, according to data collected in the 2014 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: United Statesfrom the Ponemon Institute and HP Enterprise Security. The mean cost of cyber crime for a company in the U.S. last year was $12.7 million per year; other countries’ enterprises mean costs ranged from Germany’s $8.13 million to Russia’s mere $3.33 million. The study observes a $1.1 million (or 9.3 percent) increase in cyber crime costs for the U.S. from last year’s report.  

The report commends partnerships between countries for combating cybercrime, praising public-private partnerships in particular for beginning to show tangible results in terms of fighting cybercrime, such as the partnership of 11 nations to take down a crime ring associated with the GameOver Zeus botnet in June.

JPMorgan Chase and at least four other financial institutions were hacked recently in a series of coordinated attacks, and investigators believe Russian hackers were the source of the attacks, a federal law enforcement official told USA Today.  What is less clear is whether the attacks were prompted by U.S. sanctions against the Russian government.

An industrial maintenance and construction firm in Tennessee is suing its bank to recover $327,000 in stolen funds, according to a Krebs On Security report. If the lawsuit proceeds to trial, it could be easier and cheaper for cyber attack victims to recover losses.

A new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and sponsored by McAfee, says that cybercrime costs businesses approximately $400 billion worldwide, with an impact on approximately 200,000 jobs in the U.S. and 150,000 jobs in the EU.

The UK government said it wants to hand out life sentences to anyone found guilty of a cyberattack that has a catastrophic effect.