Cyber crimes cost global economy $445 bn each year: report

The cost of cyber crime to the global economy amounted to $445 billion every year, with the damage to business from theft of intellectual property exceeding the $160 billion loss to individuals from hacking, research published Monday showed, Reuters reported.

According to the report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), cyber crime was a growth industry that damaged trade, competitiveness and innovation.

The study said a conservative estimate would put the losses at $375 billion, while the maximum could be as much as $575 billion. The study was sponsored by security software company McAfee.

"Cyber crime is a tax on innovation and slows the pace of global innovation by reducing the rate of return to innovators and investors," Jim Lewis of CSIS said in a statement.

"For developed countries, cyber crime has serious implications for employment."

The research found that the biggest economies took the most hit from the losses, with the toll on the US, China, Japan and Germany reaching $200 billion a year in total.

Losses as regards personal information, such as stolen credit card data, stood at $150 billion.

About 40 million people in the US, roughly 15 per cent of the population, had had personal information stolen by hackers, according to the study, while high-profile breaches affected 54 million people in Turkey, 16 million in Germany and more than 20 million in China.

Importantly, in establishing the parameters of its study, CSIS defined cybercrime fairly narrowly Time magazine observed.

''We felt like if the crime couldn't have occurred without the Internet we shouldn't count it,'' CSIS senior fellow Jim Lewis told TIME. Only a very small part of the sharp increase in cybercrime-like the massive data breach at Target last year-is the result of computer crimes supplanting analog crimes, Lewis said. ''The guys who did Target don't live in the United States and there's no way they could have done Target without the Internet,'' he said.

Losses from cybercrime accounted for in the report included the cost to hundreds of millions of people who had their personal information stolen. These included 40 million in the US last year, as also losses of intellectual property, theft of money and sensitive business information, and companies' cybercrime recovery costs.

According to the report, the cost to the US economy from cybercrime could include as many as 200,000 jobs.