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.
“Personal email accounts often contain the keys to your online kingdom. Not only can criminals gain access to everything in your inbox, they can also reset your passwords for any other online site you may use by clicking the ‘forgot your password’ link, intercepting those emails and effectively locking you out of your own accounts,” says Effendy Ibrahim, Internet Safety Advocate & Director, Asia, Norton by Symantec.
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.
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