The cost of cybercrime? $1tr

Data theft and breaches from cybercrime may have cost businesses as much as $1tr globally in lost intellectual property and expenditures for repairing the damage last year, according to a study from McAfee.

McAfee made the projection based on responses to a survey of more than 800 CIOs in Brazil, China, Dubai, Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the US.

The respondents estimated they lost data worth a total of $4.6bn and spent about $600m cleaning up after breaches, McAfee said.

The report, entitled Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information is due to be released today 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 per cent 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 per cent of the Chinese respondents said they believed the US poses the biggest security threat to their data.

Original article: Cybercrime cost firms $1 trillion globally, McAfee study says from CNET News.com