Norton '12 Cybercrime Numbers Lower Than Last Year's — But Just As Bad 46
Curseyoukhan writes "Norton released its annual cybercrime report on Wednesday, and the company put the 'direct costs associated with global consumer cybercrime at US $110 billion over the past twelve months.' Last year's report put the total 'at an annual price of $388 billion globally based on financial losses and time lost.' That's more than the estimated value of the global black market in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined ($288 billion), the report said. But Norton makes no mention of the vast difference in 2011 and 2012 numbers. That's because last year's number was entirely fictitious." Something tells me that the scare-monger number-wavers aren't as embarrassed by this sort of logical deconstruction as they should be.
Last Line (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully, Norton's security products are generally better than its reports.
Yea, and their security products suck donkey balls, so what's that tell you about their reports?
Friend hacked[tm] my e-mail... (Score:4, Insightful)
...deleted discussion of my $1 trillion idea, so I never got to put it into action.
Norton's figures are thus way too low.
Excluding this, though, Norton may be including the media industry association criminals who overvalue the loss of copying bits representing a Britney Spears wailing lament, or whatever the cool kids are listening to these days.
if I understand this, it says: (Score:4, Insightful)
This years made up numbers lower than last years made up numbers.
next years made up numbers might be even lower.
Is that a good thing?
Re:Vast Improvement! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, first you have to go to the BPA to find out how much software is pirated. The answer: the GNP of Brazil.
Next, you have to go to the RIAA to find out about music piracy. The answer is: the GNP of Brazil times a fudge factor of 1.5.
Then, you have to go to the MPAA to get the number of how much movie theatre and rental/royalty losses that they suffer. This is the GNP of Nigeria, times a factor of 7.233.
Finally, if you're in the systems protection business, you have to talk about the losses from break-ins, data loss, user-down time due to StuxNet (they left Iran out of the figures) which is the GNP of Greece times an amazing 294.888.
Go on check my figures. Be scared. Be very scared.
Norton is a virus (Score:3, Insightful)
But everybody blah blahs about the death of the desktop but what I think perverted the whole thing was when companies like Dell, HP, ACER, and most of the rest changed their business model to where they sold a desktop for little or no profit in the hopes of getting commissions from sales of the trialware they put on their machines.
Is it any surprise that people are buying Apples desktops, laptops, and iPads when the only thing apple really tries to sell you is iCloud? I am not Apple Fanboying here I think that any company that made a point of telling people that their machines were trialware free would make some serious gains in the market.
My old policy with family was that they would send their new laptop over and I would wipe it clean put a good AV product, Open Office, and iTunes on it and send it home. That stopped when laptops cut the left shift key in half and put the \| key there. This was some cost savings thing for foreign keyboards but for me it was the straw that broken my tech support camel's back. I won't touch one of those keyboards. Plus wiping these systems is a nightmare of drivers some of which put some bloatware back.
So for Norton to be scaremongering people into buying their crap product doesn't surprise me in the least; it just isn't their worst crime. As I said their worst crime was to be one of the biggest proponents of this trialware bloatware business model of lower end computers that has basically poisoned the PC market.