McAfee Head’s Wild Ass Claim- CyberCrime Surpasses Illegal Drug Trade

Richard Stiennon, in his article here, takes McAfee’s CEO David DeWalt to task for spreading a ridiculous meme that cyber-crime is now outpacing the illegal drug trade.

And for the record, its not. CyberCrime is big and its a bad threat. And its costs to businesses and personal lives in the area of data loss and identity theft is large, but its manageable. Drugs, on the other hand, destroy lives and kill people. They plunge entire countries into chaos and wreck economies.  They turn people into murderers and brokers of slaves.  I don’t think a phishing scam is on the same level.

McAfee’s DeWalt is quoted here.

Despite the increase in government compliance requirements and the proliferation of security tools, companies continue to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, and other cyber vulnerabilities, new McAfee CEO David DeWalt said Tuesday.

Citing recent highly publicized corporate data breaches that have beset major companies like Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Bank of America, DeWalt said that cyber-crime has become a US$105 billion business that now surpasses the value of the illegal drug trade worldwide.

So did DeWalt pull this quote and this figure out of his ass? Not really. He quoted another consultant who pulled it out of his ass two years ago.

From Stiennon here:

As I pointed out here this all began when a Reuters journalist attended a conference in Riyadh. He managed to get a juicy quote from a lawyer who used to have a privacy position for the State of Colorado and claims to have consulted for the US Treasury Department (on what I ask?). The original quote, from 2005:

“Last year was the first year that proceeds from cyber-crime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, and that was, I believe, over $105 billion,”

The cyber security vendors have come a long way from the 90’s when every sales or marketing guy would be quoted as saying the US was vulnerable to an “Electronic Pearl Harbor.” But guys who now say that cyber security is worse than drugs is probably smoking a little something themselves.