Cybercrime Losses Overestimated, Say Researchers

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Cybercrime Losses Overestimated, Say Researchers

By CircleID Reporter
July 27, 2011, 7:22 pm PDT Views: 7,693 Add Comment

Cybercrime losses may be erroneously overestimated as most information available on cybercrime losses are derived from surveys, argue two researchers in a recent paper titled, “Sex, Lies and Cybercrime Surveys”. Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley from Microsoft Research examine some of the difficulties of forming an accurate cybercrime estimate by survey:

“First, losses are extremely concentrated, so that representative sampling of the population does not give representative sampling of the losses. Second, losses are based on unverified self-reported numbers. Not only is it possible for a single outlier to distort the result, we find evidence that most surveys are dominated by a minority of responses in the upper tail (i.e., a majority of the estimate is coming from as few as one or two responses). Finally, the fact that losses are confined to a small segment of the population magnifies the difficulties of refusal rate and small sample sizes. Far from being broadly-based estimates of losses across the population, the cyber-crime estimates that we have appear to be largely the answers of a handful of people extrapolated to the whole population. A single individual who claims $50,000 losses, in an N = 1000 person survey, is all it takes to generate a $10 billion loss over the population. One unverified claim of $7,500 in phishing losses translates into $1.5 billion.”

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By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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