Is it really that big business of cybercrime?

Cybercrime moves more money than drug trafficking worldwide. " The phrase comes from the manager of an Internet security company, so you have to grab with tweezers, but is part of a widespread belief that it has become a mantra by all indications, cybercrime move a figure of up to one trillion (European, American trillion) dollars a year, becoming in fact one of the largest illicit business, over the drug or arms trafficking. However, data may be flawed from the beginning, as claimed by two researchers from Microsoft in a New York Times.
"For 15 years, cybercrime has evolved from a dark activity to become a global security concern, they say Florencio and Cormac Herley Dinei article 'The cyber crime was not tal'-but there is something wrong with this picture: Structurally, the economy of cybercrime as spam and steal passwords is the same as fishing.Economists have long established common access resources represent a bad business opportunity. "
The calculation error when assessing cybercrime come provoked, according to the authors, by a statistical aberration: the losses to consumers cybercriminals are extrapolated to the general population from surveys from a few cases which tend to be positive: ie, take the part for the whole and multiply individual cases to the general population. For example, "if you ask 5,000 people for their loss due to cybercrime and extrapolated to 200 million people, that means that every dollar becomes 40,000. If a single respondent blamed bogus losses by $ 25,000, this amounts to 1,000 million dollars to the final estimate. "
In fact, this statistical aberration happens in any survey that involves selecting a group of people. One respondent in an election poll will be "responding" for several thousands of citizens who share the same profile and home that has a people meter "means" to 10,000 homes when and TV. For Florencio and Herley denouncing the added problem is that 90% of the estimates from a study of FTC were made from only one or two answers: "two participants added to the estimated 37,000 million losses."