The threat of cybercrime is rising sharply, experts have warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Online theft costs $1 trillion a year, the number of attacks is rising sharply and too many people do not know how to protect themselves, they said. The internet was vulnerable, they said, but as it was now part of society’s central nervous system, attacks could threaten whole economies.
The past year had seen “more vulnerabilities, more cybercrime, more malicious software than ever before”, more than had been seen in the past five years combined, one of the experts reported.
On the panel discussing the issue were Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker (makers of the Firefox browser), McAfee chief executive Dave Dewalt, Harvard law professor and leading internet expert Jonathan Zittrain, Andre Kudelski of Kudelski group, which provides digital security solutions, and Tom Ilube, the boss of Garlik, a firm working on online web identity protection.
They were also joined by Microsoft’s chief research officer, Craig Mundie.
News source: BBC News
