Greeks not reporting cybercrimes
A cybersecurity study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the London-based services firm, has found that a suspiciously-high 61% of Greek businesses had not detected a single security incident over the past year.
Another 27% reported between one and two incidents while 11% reported more than three.
The eurozone average was 26% for no attacks, 20% for one to two attacks and 43% for more than three attacks, said Socratis Katsikas, a digital systems professor at the University of Piraeus who presented the data.
"It's more likely that some companies did not even realise the attack, which is worse, or don't want to report it," Katsikas told a conference organised by the Greek cybercrime police squad.
Professor Costas Lambrinoudakis, who teaches at the same department, added that from 2007 onwards financial fraud has replaced viruses as the main threat for computer users.
"Only a small number of companies will announce an incident. Most will try to conceal it to avoid bad publicity," he said.
"The most significant source of industrial espionage are insiders who are responsible for over 70% of information theft according to recent US surveys," said Massimiliano Michenzi, a Europol chief inspector specialising in credit card fraud.
Lambrinoudakis spoke of a large corporation that was baffled to see its Web server inexplicably crash every day at about seven in the evening.
It turned out that the building cleaner had been unplugging the server to connect her vacuum cleaner, he said.
"It used to be about fame among hackers but now it's proper organised crime," said Sotiris Ioannidis from the Foundation for Research and Technology (Forth) institute of computer science.
"(The perpetrators) use social networks, search engines and even innocent-looking PDF and word files to spread malware (malicious software)," he said.
According to research from software security firm Symantec, 431m adults around the world fell victim to cybercrimes in 2010.
"The cost measured in money and lost time was €284bn while the global market for cannabis, cocaine and heroin that year was worth €288bn," Ioannidis said.
Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge
Source: I-Net Bridge
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