http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/27/cybercrime_mythbusters/ By John Leyden The Register 27th March 2009 A leading security researcher has unpicked the origins of the myth that revenues from cybercrime exceeds those from the global drug trade, regurgitated by a senior security officer at AT&T before Congress last week. Ed Amoroso, Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer of AT&T, told a Congressional Committee on 20 March that cybercrime was a $1trn a year business. It'd be nice to think that Amoroso had been misquoted or made a slip of the tongue but written testimony from Amoroso repeats the amazing claim, made before a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. The end of paragraph 5 of the written submission states: Last year the FBI announced that revenues from cyber-crime, for the first time ever, exceeded drug trafficking as the most lucrative illegal global business, estimated at reaping more than $1 trillion annually in illicit profits. As Richard Stiennon points out the quoted figure would make cybercrime bigger than the entire IT industry. The top 10 Fortune 50 firms turned over $2trn last year. Put another way, revenues from cybercrime exceed those of AT&T itself ($119bn in 2008) by a factor of around eight. [...] _______________________________________________ Best Selling Security Books and More! http://www.shopinfosecnews.org/Received on Mon Mar 30 2009 - 01:20:06 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 30 2009 - 01:24:36 PDT