Aaah. The title sounds shocking? Yes its right. One fifth of the US consumers have been hit by some form of cyber crime in the past two years. If this is not shocking enough, the US consumers lost $8 billion as a result of these cyber crimes. These revelations were made by Consumer Reports survey.
According to the survey, following are some other related statistics about the cybercrimes committed in US.
- It is estimates that 1.2 million consumers have had to replace their computers over the past two years due to software infections.
- An estimated 3.7 million households with broadband Internet access did not use a firewall to protect against hackers.
- It is also estimates that about 7 million consumers gave phishers personal information over the past two years; that’s 1 in 13 online households. Among scam victims, 1 in 7 lost money in the past two years, comparable with data from the last survey. Total damage to U.S. consumers through phishing attacks works out to about $483 million.
- Consumer Reports found 545,000 households had to replace computers in the past six months and one in 12 people had serious problems with spyware.
- The reports estimates 1.7 million households were victims of ID theft committed over the Internet in the past year, of those two-thirds said the incident occurred because of an online purchase.
- The reports found that 13 percent of social-network users experienced some form of abuse.
In light of the above findings, the Consumer Reports expects cybercrimes tends to get worse as economic slump deepens. Rising unemployment and foreclosures are set to fuel a wave of recession-orientated internet scams. The problem is that despite all these financial losses and waste of important data and information, people still take the security of their systems lightly and do not install the Anti virus and Anti Spyware softwares. The US government is also a victim of the cyber crimes and recently created its own Digital Warfare Force.
Do you face any such cyber crime? If your answer is “No”, let us know the steps you have taken to ensure your security and if your answer is “Yes”, tell us how you got affected and what remedial steps you have taken to avoid such incidents in future?
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