Thursday, March 29, 2012

Wall Street's Other Huge Problem


Years after the global financial crisis of 2008, there's a new problem on the minds of those working on Wall Street, HuffPo writes.

That's the conclusion of a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, a professional services firm based in London. PwC found that so-called cybercrime -- defined in the report as "an economic crime committed using computers and the internet" -- accounted for 38 percent of all the economic crime experienced at financial service companies last year.

That's a huge jump from 2009, when financial service firms reported no cybercrime at all.

It's worth dwelling on the cybercrime figures for a moment longer though. A cybersecurity expert at PwC told The Wall Street Journal that there probably wasn't zero cybercrime in 2009 -- it's just that financial service firms didn't know enough about the problem to realize it was happening.

Thus, it's hard to say for sure whether cybercrime has really gotten worse over the last few years, or whether companies have simply become more attuned to it.

Something similar has happened at the FBI, where investigators now have about 2,500 corporate and securities fraud cases on their books -- a 47 percent increase since 2008, a year when the importance of detecting financial misconduct became painfully clear, and the government began allocating more resources to do so….

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/28/cybercrime-financial-sector_n_1385029.html?ref=business

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