Cybercrime a bigger threat than physical crime

Ran across an interesting article in Techworld from the UK by Maxwell Cooter. According to a survey by Braun Research on behalf of IBM, out of over 2,400 IT managers, nearly 60% said that in their opinion cyber-crime was more costly than traditional physical crime.  Of even more interest to me was that almost 3/4's of them said the greater threat came from their own users rather than from the outside. I guess this makes sense in light of the phenomenal interest we are seeing for network access control products like our Safe Access. It represents a fundamental shift away from the castle and moat defense , towards a more flexible shifting perimeter security philosophy. This change is causing a change in what technologies corporate security departments are investing in. 

The survey has some other great information, like 84% of IT execs think that organized criminal cybergroups possessing superior technical sophistication have replaced the lone hacker or kiddie scripters in the world of cybercrime.  This means that the ante has been raised in what we have to do to protect.  A majority of those surveyed said it is the joint responsibility of both the Federal and local law enforcement to help combat this new more dangerous threat.  There was also some interesting data on the views  of US based IT managers compared to international ones. The US group overwhelmingly believed they were much better prepared to combat cybercrime than their international counterparts.  I hope that this is not just over confidence!