Better Protection Equals Better Business
IT is pervasive. It’s central to our financial, communications, health care, physical infrastructure and even our entertainment systems. Unfortunately, it is also routinely attacked with alarming success.
Cybersecurity, methods for protecting IT assets, are therefore critical for safeguarding everything from an individual’s private information to corporate data that is the backbone of business.
Online commerce, for example, is a critical and growing segment of the U.S. economy. A recent report by an industry research group projects total e-commerce sales to grow by 7 to 8 percent per year, reaching about $250 billion by 2014. Online sales allow both entrepreneurs and established businesses quick, low-cost access to potentially millions of customers, which can encourage innovation and create new jobs.
The Internet also offers business substantial efficiencies by allowing easy communications between business partners and with remote locations to collaborate on products, telecommuting options for employees, and other benefits.
This tremendous increase in online business transactions, however, gives cyber criminals greater access to business assets than ever before, opening up risks for intellectual property theft, identity theft, and other crimes.
It's difficult to quantify the full cost of cyber crime, especially since many incidents are not reported. A 2011 government-sponsored study in the United Kingdom found that cyber crime cost £27 billion (about $44 billion) in the UK alone, with businesses bearing three-quarters of that cost. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 22% more self-reported cybercrime complaints in 2009 than the previous year — and the dollar value of these incidents was skyrocketing, up 111% in 2009 to more than $550 million.
It is clear that businesses and individuals suffer substantial losses from cyber crime and have much to gain from broader adoption and deployment of strong cybersecurity tools and techniques and from sharing lessons learned across different industry sectors.
