Each year the FBI (
San
Francisco Federal Bureau
of Investigation's Computer Intrusion Squad
) http://www.fbi.gov/
teams up with CSI (Computer Security Institute) http://www.gocsi.com/
to produce an annual report on how much damage is being sustained from
various computer security problems (not all threats are necessarily found
in a single report, because of the manner in how the data is collected).
The 2006 report just came out. It is free to download from the CSI web
site, http://www.gocsi.com/
but you gotta register with CSI to get a copy, and CSI has had at a very
small security breach, with people who registered for a prior year
report. They sent out a form for a conference to their registered
members, already filled out with registration details to make it easy for
us to confirm, but they scrambled the mailing list, so that people
generally got the details on other CSI customers. I consider that a very
trivial breach compared to what other organizations have sustained.
The information in the survey may not be reproduced without permission
from CSI, but some news media are sharing highlights, whose info I am
passing on here, however some of the news stories seem contradictory, with
respect to how they are interpreting the data. ie. in this post I am
taking info from what the news reports are saying, not directly from my
copy of the report.
The 30 page PDF report is downloaded from
http://www.gocsi.com/forms/fbi/csi_fbi_survey.jhtml;jsessionid=MMNC3WAXXTVUMQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN
I suggest that other list readers also get a copy of this, since it has a
lot of key information not yet in the news reports. In my opinion there
are some positive findings in the report with respect to trends, and
while the number of companies surveyed might seem small, some of them are
extremely large companies. Also the report has good graphs to help us
grasp implications.
Findings include:
* 616 companies participated in the latest survey.
* 1/2 of them gave details on financial costs of losses, where the average
loss was $ 167,713 (last year it was $203,606)
* 3/4 of the financial losses are due to: virus attacks, unauthorized
network access, laptop and mobile hardware theft, proprietary information
/ intellectual property theft.
* Breaches are not as lucrative for crooks as in past years, with respect
to how much they are getting directly from the companies breached
* More than 80% of the surveyed companies now conduct security audits
(meaning 1/5 are not doing so)
* Companies resist reporting being victims of computer crimes ... many
breaches still being swept under the rug
* Government mandates and compliance issues are a hot topic.
* Security outsourcing is not as prevalent in USA. as previously thought,
although I consider the report figures to be significant
* IT groups want to educate and train internally to mitigate risks.
Several of the news media articles on this FBI CSI report:
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1199280,00.html
http://www.securitypronews.com/news/securitynews/spn-45-20060714CSIFBIReportonVirusAttacksandFinancialLosses.html
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/07-13-2006/0004396284&EDATE
=
http://www.crime-research.org/news/14.07.2006/2120/
