Data theft and breaches from cybercrime may have cost businesses as much as $1tn globally in lost intellectual property and expenditures for repairing the damage last year, according to a new study from McAfee.
McAfee made the projection based on responses to a survey of more than 800 chief information officers in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil and Dubai.
The respondents estimated that they lost data worth a total of $4.6bn (£3.3bn) and spent about $600m cleaning up after breaches, McAfee said.
The report, entitled Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information is due to be released on Thursday at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. It also finds that developing countries spend more money on protecting intellectual property than companies in Western countries.
The ongoing recession is only increasing the security risk for corporations, respondents said, with 42 percent reporting that displaced workers were the biggest threat to sensitive information on the network.
There were some other interesting geographical-related results. More than one quarter of the respondents said they avoid storing data in China, and 47 percent of the Chinese respondents said they believed the US poses the biggest security threat to their data.
Talkback
Surely this is only the tip of the iceberg - the phenomenal number of data losses brought about by easy access to multiple portable storage devices eg USB, has provided a vehicle for individuals to offload whatever data they need to, usually without any control or visibility. This data is used and sometimes abused, and really the data owner has no visibility of that action taking place. The only way we can really quantify the valeu of the data being lost is when we can quantify that data or even better manage and control the data. The way to do this is by making use of an effective device control solution.