That's less than $1 per head on average. Equivalent to 1% of the population losing $100 once a year to "cybercrime." Or one out of a thousand citizens losing $1000 annually.

Sounds like chickenfeed to me.

Somebody refresh my memory: what's the aggregate cost so far of the Iraq and Afghanistan incursions?

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

a day in iraq then? slow news day?

These statistics are completely understated.

So if you read the terms of Ebay Paypal , they must be coining the money in by doubling up the losses of the unfortunate seller , by a simple stroke of a key !

After seeing so many inflated guesstimates from computer security vendors over the past decade, it's good to see some hard numbers reported in by some very real people. The one dollar per person, as suggested by RW, sounds plausible. Serious enough to warrant attention, but not stupid.

Compare: "Code Red has already cost an estimated $1.2 billion in damage, and may top out at an incredible $8.7 billion when its bitter reign of destruction finally ends."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/08/02/code_red_hysteria_8_7bn/

So, $240 million lost to real, reported fraud compared to $8.7 billion lost to imaginary, guesstimated damage from a single piece of malware. I wonder if any of the Code Red-affected folks filed insurance claims.

The damage from Code Red was far from imaginary. As someone who was involved in the clean-up for one major international company, I'd say the figure quoted was perfectly realistic.

Your continued restating of the fallacy that viruses cost nothing and impact no-one is irresponsible