Symantec this week released a study that purports to rank US cities in terms of their risk for cybercrime. The full report offers a ranking of the top 50, and might at first blush give you pause if you live in the one of the top 10:
1 Seattle, W A
2 Boston, MA
3 Washington,
4 San Francisco, CA
5 Raleigh, NC
6 Atlanta, GA
7 Minneapolis, MN
8 Denver, CO
9 Austin, TX
10 Portland, OR
Of course, a little closer reading of the study reveals a highly positive correlation between rank and Wifi hotspots per population density, amount spent on computers and internet access, and frequency of use. Symantec, hardly a dispassionate observer of network security trends, confirms that where people use the Net more often, there are more security problems. Thanks for that folks.
The study is not all common sense though. The full report does list estimates per city for such variables as expenditure, daily use, online purchasing, and broadband connectivity. So, you can ask yourself why, for example, people in Virginia Beach spend up a storm online compared to the good folks of Detroit. Not quite enough here to give the Pew Internet Life project a run for its money but it’s sure to give the news media a convenient headline in some cities.
Update — and wouldn’t you know: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/content/strong-tech-sector-increases-austin%E2%80%99s-risk-cybercrime
Interesting report by Symantec… but sadly it seems to me like it’s mostly aimed at scaring people into buying their products.
I was shocked to learn how fast the threat of cybercrime is growing. I couldn’t believe a report from the Department of Treasury that the profits of Cybercrime are greater than the profits of the sale of illegal drugs. When President Obama informed us that cybercriminals have stolen $8 billion dollars from Americans in the past two years and the cost of repairing computers has risen to $11 billion a year. Cybercrime is not about vandalism. It is about our economy.
Everyone who works on a pc should be familiar with the term “Cyber Crime”. Initially, when man invented computer and then the technology for communicating between computers was evolved, he would have never thought that the cyber space he is creating could be flooded with any crime i.e. cyber crime. But now nearly all of us might have heard the term computer crime, cyber crime, e-crime, hi-tech crime or electronic crime which is nothing but an activity done with a criminal intent in cyber space. Simply put, it’s an activity which is usually criminal in nature, where a computer or network is the source, tool, target, or place of a crime. To say in one line, “Cyber crime refers to all the activities done with criminal intent in cyberspace.”
The security software and suites that these businesses sell do not prevent cybercrime. They mainly focus on worms, Trojans horses, and spyware that permit hackers to infect your pc. It takes numerous hours for the security companies to capture and analyze the problem, write a new solution, and get it to you. As a result, hackers are usually one step ahead of the security businesses. This explains why 172,000 computers are hacked each day.