The costs of theft

The costs of computer theft are often underestimated. With a theft, much more is lost than the hardware alone. Important contributors the the overall costs of theft are:

• Hardware.
• Loss of productivity of the owner (time).
• Recovering backups.
• Ordering and configuring new hardware.
• Loss of data.
• Disclosure of sensitive information.

Wat are the losses?

In this example we will calculate the theft losses for a typical university. The total losses of a single theft are estimated at €4450.

The university in this example has 4500 employees en at least the same amount of computers. With the risk of theft being 4 percent per year (laptops and desktops), 180 computers per year a stolen. This brings the total losses to €800.000 per year.

With VirtuaLock, this university saves more than 80% on the annual theft losses.

Estimate your theft losses

Theft losses will differ per company or institution. The main message is that the losses of a theft incident will always be a multitude of the losses of the hardware alone!

On behalf of Intel, the Ponemon Institute has performed a thorough investigation to the losses of computer theft. The results may help you in estimating your theft losses. The main outcome in this report are the average losses of a single laptop theft in the USA: $49,246. By selecting which individual components of these losses apply to your company you can estimate your total losses.

The annual survey of the American Computer Security Instritute (CSI) also gives a detailed insight in computer crime in general, and computer theft in particular.