After chasing personal information of individuals world over, cybercriminals are now targeting the trade secrets of well-known global organisations including those in India as they see greater value in selling a corporation's proprietary information to competitors and foreign governments, according to a report.
"Cybercriminals are now focusing on trade secrets of global companies. Sophisticated attacks like Operation Aurora, and even unsophisticated attacks like Night Dragon, have infiltrated some of the of the largest, and seemingly most protected corporations in the world," says Simon Hunt, VP and chief technology officer, endpoint security at McAfee.
The report 'Underground Economies: Intellectual Capital and Sensitive Corporate Data Now the Latest Cybercrime Currency', has been prepared by security technology company McAfee and Science Applications International Corporation, a scientific, engineering, and technology applications company in USA.
More than 1,000 senior IT decision makers in India, US, UK, Japan, China, Brazil and West Asia were surveyed for it. Out of the 100 representatives from different organisations surveyed from India, 29% said they had suffered a security breach and this number has increased from 19% in 2008.
32% of the Indian respondents said they only occasionally take steps to remediate and protect systems for the future after a breach or attempted breach. 11% of them said their organisations accrued a loss between 0-$500,000 while 27% indicated a loss between $500,000-$1,000,000 due to loss of sensitive information or intellectual property.
40% Indian respondents indicated that data breach or threat of a data breach affected their merger and acquisition plan and 26% said it affected their product roll-out.
Two years ago, McAfee produced the 'Unsecured Economies report', which found that businesses companies worldwide lost more than an estimated $1 trillion in 2008 due to data leaks, the cost of remediation and reputational damage.