It’s a pretty technical read, but this recent Microsoft report, "Sex, Lies and Cyber-crime Surveys" by Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley tries to support an interesting hypothesis: cyber-crime surveys that suggest huge losses from hacking and phishing aren’t reliable. Here’s an excerpt of their thinking:
First, [cyber-crime] losses are extremely concentrated, so that representative sampling of the population does not give representative sampling of the losses.… More