The average net loss per incident reported was $19 million in high technology, $29 million in services, and $36 million in manufacturing. ASIC than upped its estimate to $300 billion in 1997 alone - compared to $100 billion assessed by the 1995 report of the White House Office of Science and Technology.
This figures are mere extrapolations based on anecdotal tales of failed espionage. Many incidents go unreported.
In his address to the 1998 World Economic Forum, Frank Ciluffo, Deputy Director of the CSIS Global Organized Crime Project, made clear why: "The perpetrators keep quiet for obvious reasons. The victims do so out of fear. It may jeopardize shareholder and consumer confidence. Employees may lose their jobs.
It may invite copycats by inadvertently revealing vulnerabilities. And competitors may take advantage of the negative publicity. In fact, they keep quiet for all the same reasons corporations do not report computer intrusions".
Interactive Television Technologies complained - in a press release dated August 16, 1996 - that someone broke into its Amherst, NY, offices and stole "three computers containing the plans, schematics, diagrams and specifications for the BUTLER, plus a number of computer disks with access codes." BUTLER is a proprietary technology which helps connect television to computer networks, such as the Internet. It took four years to develop.
In a single case, described in the Jan/Feb 1996 issue of "Foreign Affairs", Ronald Hoffman, a software scientist, sold secret applications developed for the Strategic Defense Initiative to Japanese corporations, such as Nissan Motor Company, Mitsubishi Electric, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries. He was caught in 1992, having received $750,000 from his "clients", who used the software in their civilian aerospace projects.
Canal Plus Technologies, a subsidiary of French media giant Vivendi, filed a lawsuit last March against NDS, a division of News Corp. Canal accused NDS of hacking into its pay TV smart cards and distributing the cracked codes freely on a piracy Web site. It sued NDS for $1.1 billion in lost revenues. This provided a rare glimpse into information age, hacker-based, corporate espionage tactics.
Executives of publicly traded design software developer Avant! went to jail for purchasing batches of computer code from former employees of Cadence in 1997.
Reuters Analytics, an American subsidiary of Reuters Holdings, was accused in 1998 of theft of proprietary information from Bloomberg by stealing source codes from its computers.
In December 2001, Say Lye Ow, a Malaysian subject and a former employee of Intel, was sentenced to 24 months in prison for illicitly copying computer files containing advanced designs of Intel's Merced (Itanium) microprocessor. It was the crowning achievement of a collaboration between the FBI's High-Tech squad and the US Attorney's Office CHIP - Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property - unit.