Blog - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 14:30 - 3 Comments

Symantec smoking own cybercrime hype

blog Oh dear. I’ve written before about the penchant which IT security firms and industry executives have for hyping up cybercrime, but this effort from Norton manufacturer Symantec just takes the cake. It looks as if Symantec commissioned a report by a company called Strategy One which claimed to show the global cybercrime trade caused losses as large as the value of the global trade in illicit drugs. Security journalist Patrick Gray has the dirt at his site for his podcast Risky.Biz. Some of the many money quotes:

“Based on the responses Strategy One received, direct annual consumer losses extrapolate to USD$114bn a year … That figure seems high enough, but where things get comical is when Norton throws indirect losses into the mix.

Norton is actually equating a fictional “time lost dollars” — that never actually existed — with actual dollars spent on marijuana. You’d think the marketroids were smoking the green stuff themselves when they came up with that comparison.”

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