Cybercrime costs US business $378m

NEWS The vast majority of respondents - 85 per cent - reported security breaches in the last 12 months, a massive increase on the 1999 figure of 42 per cent. The study, carried out by the US-based Computer Security Institute, identified corporate espionage as the biggest problem, with over six per cent of respondents reporting the loss of $151m worth of proprietary data. About four per cent of respondents reported $93m of financial fraud through cybercrime. The majority of security breaches originated over the internet, overturning a long held assumption that most computer attacks were launched from inside the organisaton. The FBI has also announced that it last week launched more than 40 investigations in the US into hacking incidents committed by criminals in Eastern Europe. The FBI believes hackers have stolen more than one million credit card numbers from ecommerce sites. However, the FBI warned that the figure could rise further as they are continuing their investigations with organised criminals from Russia and the Ukraine.