Ten scariest hacking statistics

1. Playstation Network

Hacking attacks are no longer isolated to just the computer you use to send emails and browse the web. In April of 2011 the Sony Playstation Network had to shut down for a few days as well as their Qriocity service due to an  “external intrusion” that compromised an estimated 77 million user accounts.

2. Intellectual Property Stolen

In the year 2008 alone there was an estimated $1 Trillion dollars worth of intellectual property stolen due to hackers gaining access to confidential data stored on enterprise systems worldwide. That’s enough to make even Dr. Evil happy.

3. Passwords

It takes only 10 minutes to crack a lowercase password that is 6 characters long. Add two extra letters and a few uppercase letters and that number jumps to 3 years. Add just one more character and some numbers and symbols and it will take 44,530 years to crack.

4. Victims

Nearly three quarters, 73 percent, of all Americans have fallen victim to some type of cyber crime. Makes you wonder if that has any effect on the local real estate market?

5. Time is not on your side

There is a 156 day lapse between the time a computer resource is compromised and the time the compromise is detected. That leaves your attacker almost half a year to run amok. The sad part is, using a proven malware solution on all computer resources, including web servers, can reduce the amount of time substantially.

6. Business is booming

In a recent survey it was reported that 90 percent of all businesses suffered some sort of computer hack over the past 12 months and 77 percent of these companies felt that they were successfully attacked several times over the same period of time. Since most attacks are a direct result of a malware infection, small businesses need to have some type of protection in place.

7. Zombies everywhere!

In 2009 the security firm Finjan discovered a bot net run by a Ukranian gang that consisted of over 1.9 million zombie computers. The bot net earned its owners up to $190,000 per day. Talk about an apocalypse!

8. Infected sites

Talk about surfing in shark infested waters… Research estimates that every day more than 30,000 websites are infected with some type of malware; most of them belonging to small businesses. Without proper a proper malware detection and removal solution in place, SMEs run the risk of having their web presence shut down by their hosting company, isp or even removed from Google’s search.

9. Vulnerable sites

Not only do web sites face the threat of malware, but the number of applications that power web 2.0 sites open the door to many vulnerabilities as well. In 2010 the average web site was found to have over 230 serious vulnerabilities. Only 53 percent of these vulnerabilities were dealt with over the course of a year.

10. Who are you?

Over 27 million Americans have fallen victim to identity theft over the past five years. 9 million of them found their identities stolen in the last year alone.

https://www.stopthehacker.com/2012/04/20/ten-scariest-hacking-statistics/