Survey: Cybercrime Steady But Less Costly

The eighth annual Computer Crime and Security Survey by the Computer Security Institute (CSI) here and the FBI surveyed 530 IT security professionals in U.S. businesses, government agencies, health-care organizations and universities.

Although survey respondents reported about the same number of significant computer security incidents as last year, their losses from the breaches totaled $201.7 million, which is sharply down from the $455 million in losses reported last year, according to CSI. Seventy-five percent of this year's respondents reported financial losses, but only 251 could quantify the losses.

Theft of proprietary information caused the most financial loss, in line with previous surveys. Respondents reported $70.1 million in losses from theft of proprietary data, and the average loss was about $2.7 million.

Denial-of-service attacks were the second-most expensive computer crime, causing losses of $65.6 million, up 250 percent from last year.

For the fourth year in a row, more respondents cited their Internet connection instead of their internal systems as a common point of attack.