Norton Reveals The Shocking Scale of Cyber Crime in Asia

The money - and value of time - lost to cyber crime. In India it amounts to about US$4 billion per year.

Norton has released a report on the current cyber crime situation across the world. It claims, for example, that just over one million people each day fall victim to a new online crime, and the cost of money stolen totals over US$300 billion. It’s also alarming to note that web users in developing countries are more likely to fall prey to online felons.

The research was conducted in partnership with the international research agency StrategyOne, by conducting online surveys amongst nearly 20,000 people in 24 countries – even including children . Here, I’ve tried to summarise the report from an Indian perspective:

“Cybercrime” in India

According to Norton, the Indian population that was surveyed spent an average of 30 hours per week online, as compared to the global average of 24 hours per week. The time spent online echoes the fact that most of us in India are now using the Internet to fulfill all our needs – from work to personal – and a great deal of it on our mobiles.

Cyber crime hotspots show the percentage of adults who have been online fraud victimes. India is in joint 4th place with Singapore and Brazil.

But what worries me the most is that a staggering 80 percent of online adults in developing countries have experienced cyber crime in their lifetime. That’s bad news for India. In contrast, only 69 percent of people in developed nations have fallen victim to it. To make matters even worse, India ranks in fourth place in terms of the number of adults who have been victims of cyber crime. That list is dominated by Asian countries such as China, Singapore, India, and Hong Kong. Japan’s relatively much more secure as compared to its Asian counterparts, with the least number of adults experiencing crime online.

The report lists the following as the top cyber crimes in India:

1. Computer viruses or spyware (60 percent)
2. Online scams (20 percent)
3. Phishing (19 percent)

While there are many kinds of online attacks happening around Asia, we at Penn Olson try covering some of the more noticeable ones. Our readers might remember the Chinese stalker who spied on girls through a webcam hack, and then blackmailed them with their nude photos. There was also the malicious Adobe Flash file that caused Gmail spear-phishing in China. It not hard to understand why there is a rising concern about cyber crime in India, and indeed across the whole continent.

Why is Asia Getting Hit So Hard by Cyber Crime?

There appear to be four core weaknesses in online security and usage in Asia: