Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime

著者: Ross J. Anderson, Chris Barton, Rainer Böhme, Richard Clayton, Michel J. G. van Eeten, Michael Levi, Tyler Moore, Stefan Savage - The Economics of Information Security and Privacy 2012 被引用: 548

In this paper we present what we believe to be the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. It was prepared in response to a request from the UK Ministry of Defence following scepticism that previous studies had hyped the problem. For each of the main categories of cybercrime we set out what is and is not known of the direct costs, indirect costs and defence costs – both to the UK and to the world as a whole. We distinguish carefully between traditional crimes that are now ‘cyber ’ because they are conducted online (such as tax and welfare fraud); transitional crimes whose modus operandi has changed substantially as a result of the move online (such as credit card fraud); new crimes that owe their existence to the Internet; and what we might call platform crimes such as the provision of botnets which facilitate other crimes rather than being used to extract money from victims directly. As far as direct costs are concerned, we find that traditional offences such as tax and welfare fraud cost the typical citizen in the low hundreds of pounds/Euros/dollars a year; transitional frauds cost a few pounds/Euros/dollars; while the new computer crimes cost in the tens of pence/cents. However, the indirect costs and defence costs are much higher for