McAfee: '$1 trillion global cyber crime cost was over the top'
Mike Fey, global chief technology officer at security software company McAfee, has retracted the company's claims that pinned worldwide losses from cyber crime at more than $1tn, adding that supposedly more conservative (gu)estimates were also "hard for me to swallow".
"I wish we had never put a dollar figure on it," Fey told the Australian Financial Review. "[It is] very scary to just latch onto the number."
"People take that half-a-trillion number, and say ‘that's what it's worth'. What they forget is organisations are spending a very large amount of money to defer attacks today - so there's an additive number that has to go on top of that. It would be like saying car crashes kill three people a year in this particular city, so how much should we invest in stop lights. It's flawed."
