It is time to standardize the reporting of cyber crime to give a more realistic estimation of its breadth and costs, said Franz-Stefan Gady in the Huffington Post. According to Norton’s recent annual report, 431 million adults worldwide were victims of cyber crime last year at a cost of $114 billion. Yet Gady says, “We actually lack comprehensive data in assessing the true scale and scope of cyber crime. This is because we primarily rely on businesses to voluntarily self-report incidences of attacks and intrusions without any means to verify their statements. To turn the tide in the fight against cyber crime, we first need to know its true impact on the world economy.”
There are dozens of public and private cyber security data distribution forums in existence already, but the number, scope and diversity make for a complex environment where sharing information is very difficult. What is needed is the equivalent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Contro, an umbrella organization coordinating the different activities of forums that could conduct broad analysis. In the United States, the National Security Telecommunication Advisory Committee provides a good model, Gady writes.