TY - GEN
T1 - Estimating the costs of consumer-facing cybercrime: A tailored instrument and representative data for six EU countries
AU - Riek, Markus
AU - Boehme, Rainer
AU - Ciere, Michael
AU - Hernandez Ganan, Carlos
AU - van Eeten, Michel
N1 - Conference code: 2016
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - While cybercrime has existed for many years and is still reported to be a growing problem, reliable estimates of the economic impacts are rare. We develop a survey instrument tailored to measure the costs of consumer-facing cybercrime systematically, by aggregating different cost factors into direct losses and expenses for protection measures. We use our instrument to collect representative primary data on the prevalence of seven different types of consumer-facing cybercrime in six European countries. Our results show that cybercrime rather causes losses of time than money and that the losses of victims are dwarfed by the expenses for preventive protection. We identify scams to be the worst type of cybercrime in terms of losses. While identity thefts associated with financial accounts cause high initial losses for the victims, most of them receive substantial compensation. We find that loss distributions are skewed to the left, bearing the risk of overestimating costs when looking at figures summarized by the arithmetic mean.
AB - While cybercrime has existed for many years and is still reported to be a growing problem, reliable estimates of the economic impacts are rare. We develop a survey instrument tailored to measure the costs of consumer-facing cybercrime systematically, by aggregating different cost factors into direct losses and expenses for protection measures. We use our instrument to collect representative primary data on the prevalence of seven different types of consumer-facing cybercrime in six European countries. Our results show that cybercrime rather causes losses of time than money and that the losses of victims are dwarfed by the expenses for preventive protection. We identify scams to be the worst type of cybercrime in terms of losses. While identity thefts associated with financial accounts cause high initial losses for the victims, most of them receive substantial compensation. We find that loss distributions are skewed to the left, bearing the risk of overestimating costs when looking at figures summarized by the arithmetic mean.
KW - Costs of cybercrime
KW - Consumer research
KW - Empirical measurement
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:72a74f3b-94eb-41ca-992b-8d29977ab4d1
M3 - Conference contribution
SP - 1
EP - 43
BT - Proceedings of Workshop of Economics of Information Security
T2 - Workshop of Economics of Information Security
Y2 - 13 June 2016
ER -