Cost per victim goes up this year, with cybercriminals starting to focus their efforts on social networks and mobile devices.
2012 Norton Cybercrime Report, an annual study to understand how cybercrime affects consumers, and how the adoption and evolution of new technologies impacts people’s security. Click to read detailed report.
The annual Norton Cybercrime Report is one of the world’s largest consumer cybercrime studies, involving 13,000 adults from 24 countries.
The 2012 edition of the study tags the direct costs of global consumer cybercrime at US$110 billion over the past 12 months.
In Singapore, more than 1.4 million people fell victim to cybercrime in the same period, suffering approximately S$1.2 billion in direct financial losses.
This works out to an average of S$812 per victim in Singapore.
The equivalent global average direct cost per victim is only S$244.
Globally, every second, 18 adults become a victim of cybercrime, resulting in more than one-and-a-half million cybercrime victims each day.
Social networks and mobile devices
In Singapore, one in five online adults (20 percent) has been a victim of either social or mobile cybercrime, and 36 percent of social network users have been victims of social cybercrime.
- 12% social network users reported someone had hacked into their profile and pretended to be them.
- 12% of social network users said they’d fallen victim to a scam or fake link on social network platforms.
- While 80% believe that cybercriminals are setting their sights on social networks, less than half (46 percent) actually use a security solution which protects them from social network threats and only 55 percent use the privacy settings to control what information they share, and with whom.
- Nearly one-third (31%) of mobile users received a text message from someone they didn’t know requesting that they click on an embedded link or dial an unknown number to retrieve a “voicemail”.
Although most Internet users take basic steps to protect themselves and their personal information – such as deleting suspicious emails and being careful with their personal details online – other core precautions are being ignored.
41 percent don’t use complex passwords or change their passwords frequently, and more than a third (40 percent) do not check for the padlock symbol in the browser before entering sensitive personal information online – such as banking details.
With people sending, receiving, and storing everything from personal photos (54 percent) to work-related correspondence and documents (52 percent), to bank statements (32 percent) and passwords for other online accounts (23 percent) – those email accounts can be a potential gateway for criminals looking for personal and corporate information.
Norton Cybercrime Report (16-30 July 2012 )
StrategyOne conducted online interviews with 13,000 adults, aged 18-64, from 24 countries.
500 adult respondents were interviewed in all countries except in USA and India, where 1,000 adult respondents were interviewed in each of these two countries.
The global data has been normalised to ensure all countries have equal representation of 500 adults.
The 24 countries were: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA).
You can pore through the details of the Norton Cybercrime Report globally and by country – here.
Tags: mobile devices, Norton, Norton Cybercrime Report, security, Singapore, social networks, Symantec
[…] while the number of online adults who have experienced cybercrime has decreased (from 48 percent in 2012 to 37 percent in 2013), the average cost per victim has risen by 75 percent (S$1,448 in 2013, up […]