The challenge of measuring cyber-dependent crimes

Cybercrime is now well-established and there are plenty of opportunities for cyber-criminals to make money – by stealing money from victims’ bank accounts and by selling stolen data on the underground market. As such, it is hardly surprising that government agencies, security vendors and businesses have sought to quantify the scale and cost of attacks. Some try to quantify the global impact, some focus on the impact within a specific geo-political region, and others try to estimate the cost of a specific attack.1, 2, 3 Although it is a widely recognised problem, attempts to quantify cyber-dependent crime have resulted in dramatically varied numbers, highlighting the difficulty of trying to establish the scale, cost and impact of attacks. Prof Steven Furnell and Dr Maria Papadaki of Plymouth University, and David Emm of Kaspersky Lab examine various published sources in order to determine the nature (and potential quality) of the information, and underlying measures, relating to cyber-dependent crime. They find that it is more important to understand the impact of incidents (and how to prevent them) than to focus on metrics.