As @faul_sname notes, the $8T number (or $9.5T from on source cited in that wikipedia article) isn’t plausible. At least, not without some very generous definitions of “cybercrime,” “is,” “costing,” and “trillions.”
By which I mean: if you squint really hard, and count all the money and time everyone everywhere is spending on all (digital and non-digital) cybercrime prevention and countermeasures, and try to estimate all the extra things people could do to generate value if they didn’t have to worry about cybercrime, then sure, maybe you could get numbers up to a few trillion.
But that’s a bit like saying the cost of other crime includes all spending on the criminal and civil justice system, all spending on private security and surveillance by individuals and businesses, the entire salary of every cashier (since they wouldn’t be needed if people would just count up their own purchases and leave payment), and every time someone doesn’t do something because they don’t want to go out wandering by themselves at 3am. Not actually a useful metric for deciding where it’s worthwhile to increase or decrease resource allocations or to make regulatory decisions.
As @faul_sname notes, the $8T number (or $9.5T from on source cited in that wikipedia article) isn’t plausible. At least, not without some very generous definitions of “cybercrime,” “is,” “costing,” and “trillions.”
By which I mean: if you squint really hard, and count all the money and time everyone everywhere is spending on all (digital and non-digital) cybercrime prevention and countermeasures, and try to estimate all the extra things people could do to generate value if they didn’t have to worry about cybercrime, then sure, maybe you could get numbers up to a few trillion.
But that’s a bit like saying the cost of other crime includes all spending on the criminal and civil justice system, all spending on private security and surveillance by individuals and businesses, the entire salary of every cashier (since they wouldn’t be needed if people would just count up their own purchases and leave payment), and every time someone doesn’t do something because they don’t want to go out wandering by themselves at 3am. Not actually a useful metric for deciding where it’s worthwhile to increase or decrease resource allocations or to make regulatory decisions.