Hackers in China and Russia, security experts say, are habitually breaking into foreign travelers’ mobile devices, leapfrogging into their corporate networks and stealing sensitive government information and corporate trade secrets, often undetected. I explored this issue in an article in Saturday’s New York Times.
But how much have they stolen? Nobody really knows. Most companies I spoke with were reluctant to discuss security breaches or even disclose what policies, if any, they had put in place to protect their trade secrets. In most cases, security experts say, companies do not realize they have been compromised until long after the fact. Yet nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that as hackers improve their capabilities, and as Americans migrate to a mobile workplace, the problem has only grown worse.
In testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services last September, A.T. Smith, the assistant director of the United States Secret Service, estimated that in 2010, cyberthieves abroad stole 867 terabytes of data from the United States, or “nearly four times the amount of data collected in the archives of the Library of Congress.”
Full story here: How much have foreign hackers stolen?