"[P]eople still choose comfort over security. If you don't enforce a password policy, don't expect your users to do it for you."
A fairly large instance of the Pony Botnet Controller produced so much data, we thought it would be interesting to look into some statistics regarding this particular attack.
~1,580,000 website login credentials stolen
~320,000 email account credentials stolen
~41,000 FTP account credentials stolen
~3,000 Remote Desktop credentials stolen
~3,000 Secure Shell account credentials stolen
Allan Friedman, Austen Mack-Crane and Ross Hammond say they developed a preliminary model to look at the long-term consequences of data theft on diverse economic sectors. Their approach depends on treating cyber theft not as a problem of stolen assets worth an intrinsic value, but as one of diminished future growth.
When so framed, the effect that stolen data has on companies within a sector--the ones the preliminary model investigates are the chemical, pharmaceutical, financial, consumer mobile phone and semi-conductor industry--depends on what type of data is stolen and the competitive nature of those sectors.