The CSI, the association for members of the information security community, conducted the survey with the help of San Francisco FBI's Computer Intrusion Squad. The results confirm that the threat from computer crime and other information security breaches continues unabated.
According to the CSI report,
Overall financial losses from 530 survey respondents totalled $201,797,340, down significantly from 503 respondents reporting $455,848,000 last year. (75% of organizations acknowledged financial loss, though only 47% could quantify them.)
The overall number of significant incidents remained roughly the same as last year, despite the drop in financial losses.
Losses reported for financial fraud were drastically lower, at $9,171,400. This compares to nearly $116 million reported last year.
As in prior years, theft of proprietary information caused the greatest financial loss ($70,195,900 was lost, with the average reported loss being approximately $2.7 million).
In a shift from previous years, the second-most expensive computer crime among survey respondents was denial of service, with a cost of $65,643,300--up 250% from last year's losses of $18,370,500.
The results indicate that, as in previous years, cybercrime threats come from both inside and outside organisations.
Forty-five percent of respondents detected unauthorized access by insiders. But for the fourth year in a row, more respondents (78%) cited their internet connection as a frequent point of attack than cited their internal systems as a frequent point of attack (36%).
The full survey report can be requested from the CSI site at:
www.gocsi.com/forms/fbi/pdf.html
