Cybercrime a Growing Threat

 What is cyber crime?  The PwC report, which you can read here, defines it this way:

For our survey questionnaire, we defined cybercrime as: ‘an economic crime committed using computers and the internet. It includes distributing viruses, illegally downloading files, phishing and pharming, and stealing personal information like bank account details. It’s only a cybercrime if a computer, or computers, and the internet play a central role in the crime, and not an incidental one.’

The report warns that cybercrime doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Instead of looking at cybersecurity from all angles, organizations have pigeonholed it as an IT problem.

Highlights of the survey include:

• Sixty percent of respondents said their organization doesn’t monitor the use of social media sites.
• Two in five respondents had no cybersecurity training.
• Thirty-four percent of respondents experienced economic crime in the last twelve months, up from 30 percent reported in 2009. Half of those respondents perceive the risk of cybercrime to be on the rise.
• Almost one in ten who reported fraud suffered losses of more than $5 million.
• Fifty-six percent of respondents said the most serious fraud was an “inside job.”
• Suspicious transaction monitoring has emerged as the most effective fraud detection method (up from 5 percent in 2009 to 18 percent in 2011).

These crimes aren’t limited to big companies. While no industry is immune, communications and insurance companies top the list. The PwC survey says that “54 percent of the respondents who experienced economic crime were from organizations with more than 1,000 employees.