Norton Overestimated Cyber Crime Figures
Norton, the consumer division of Symantec, was noticed to overestimate some online security figures. For example, for the last month the net saw the stories that claimed digital crimes costs society $388 billion per year. These figures are tagged onto to stories about cyber crimes.
These figures can be found in a Norton survey report asking around 20,000 people in two dozen countries about their experience with digital crime. The survey asked the respondents to evaluate both direct and indirect losses they think were caused by cyber crime.
Norton concluded that punters lost $114 billion per year, including consumer losses that were reimbursed – the most widespread case of such kind of crime is credit card fraud. However, the company seemed to fudge things a little: for example, it decided that online harassment was also a cyber crime, as well as being approached on the Internet by sexual predators. Moreover, the term “fraud” was defined so widely that it would have covered all credit card fraud, as the word “online” can’t even be found in the definition.
Nevertheless, this wasn’t enough for Norton, who firmly decided to make the statistics appear worse by calculating how much the cyber crime experiences in question were worth including “time lost”. And this last figure alone more than doubled the direct losses, as it was calculated to be $274 billion.
The media couldn’t miss the fact that even with the faulty reasoning something strange is happening with the numbers. Norton took the UN figures for the trade in heroin, cocaine and marijuana, reasoning that it was worth $411 billion a year. Meanwhile, if you add the $114 billion for direct Internet crime losses to the $274 billion for “time lost”, you’ll end up with a figure pretty close to the drug sales! In other words, Norton claimed that online crime is close to all global drug trafficking. The company is therefore boosting figures with “time lost” money, which in reality never existed, thus meaning that cyber crime is as bad as an industry based on real money!
Moreover, the experts found out that Norton made a press release two years ago, claiming that online crime eclipsed the global drug trade, and it seems that this time it reiterates the same, simply trying to back it up with numbers. As for the company itself, Norton explained that discrepancies can be explained by huge amount of unreported crime. At the same time, they insist that the company is confident it provides a valid representation of the current state of consumer online crime.
These figures can be found in a Norton survey report asking around 20,000 people in two dozen countries about their experience with digital crime. The survey asked the respondents to evaluate both direct and indirect losses they think were caused by cyber crime.
Norton concluded that punters lost $114 billion per year, including consumer losses that were reimbursed – the most widespread case of such kind of crime is credit card fraud. However, the company seemed to fudge things a little: for example, it decided that online harassment was also a cyber crime, as well as being approached on the Internet by sexual predators. Moreover, the term “fraud” was defined so widely that it would have covered all credit card fraud, as the word “online” can’t even be found in the definition.
Nevertheless, this wasn’t enough for Norton, who firmly decided to make the statistics appear worse by calculating how much the cyber crime experiences in question were worth including “time lost”. And this last figure alone more than doubled the direct losses, as it was calculated to be $274 billion.
The media couldn’t miss the fact that even with the faulty reasoning something strange is happening with the numbers. Norton took the UN figures for the trade in heroin, cocaine and marijuana, reasoning that it was worth $411 billion a year. Meanwhile, if you add the $114 billion for direct Internet crime losses to the $274 billion for “time lost”, you’ll end up with a figure pretty close to the drug sales! In other words, Norton claimed that online crime is close to all global drug trafficking. The company is therefore boosting figures with “time lost” money, which in reality never existed, thus meaning that cyber crime is as bad as an industry based on real money!
Moreover, the experts found out that Norton made a press release two years ago, claiming that online crime eclipsed the global drug trade, and it seems that this time it reiterates the same, simply trying to back it up with numbers. As for the company itself, Norton explained that discrepancies can be explained by huge amount of unreported crime. At the same time, they insist that the company is confident it provides a valid representation of the current state of consumer online crime.
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