Report: Cybercrime and espionage costs $445 billion annually

BY ELLEN NAKASHIMA AND ANDREA PETERSON 

June 2014

A Washington think tank has estimated the likely annual cost of cybercrime and economic espionage to the world economy at more than $445 billion — or almost 1 percent of global income. 

The estimate by the Center for Strategic and International Studies is lower than the eye-popping $1 trillion figure cited by President Obama, but it nonetheless puts cybercrime in the ranks of drug trafficking in terms of worldwide economic harm. 

“This is a global problem and we aren’t doing enough to manage risk,” said James A. Lewis, CSIS senior fellow and co-author of the report, released Monday. 

The report, funded by the security firm McAfee, which is part of Intel Security, represents one of the first efforts to analyze the costs, drawing on a variety of data. 

“Cybercrime costs are big, and they’re growing,” said Stewart A. Baker, a former Department of Homeland Security policy official and a co-author of the report. “The more that governments understand what those costs are, the more likely they are to bring their laws and policies into line with preventing those sorts of losses.” 

According to the report, the most advanced economies suffered the greatest losses. The United States, Germany and China together accounted for about $200 billion of the total in 2013. Much of that was due to theft of intellectual property by foreign governments. 

Though the report does not break out a figure for that, or name countries behind such theft, the U.S. government has publicly named China as the major perpetrator of cyber economic espionage against the United States.