Cyber-crime becomes "gigantic industry"

Cyber-crime rises globally and now causes some 600 billion U.S. dollars of damage a year, experts said at the International Forum for Business Communication in Vienna Wednesday evening.

"Cyber-crime involves an extremely broad field, becoming a gigantic industry," said Roman Biller, general director of a U.S.-based IT company Unisys in Austria, according to Kronen Zeitung, a local newspaper said.

In the year of 2013, the U.S. suffered a loss of 100 billion U.S. dollars from cyber-crime, 0.64 percent of its GDP, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. thinktank.

An ever-increasing number of people surfing online "have opened many loopholes", Biller said.

It is shown that 5 percent of netizens have received fraudulent emails in which the senders claimed to be an heir to a large sum of money, according to Biller.

Silvia Strasser from the Austria Federal Criminal Police said cyber-crime works well "because the clientele is large -- almost everyone has a smartphone."

According to the International Data Corporation, more than 1.25 billion smartphones will be shipped worldwide in 2014.

Hackers are able to commit more crimes because the offenses are relatively "painless," with no blood, no opponents and no contact, Strasser said.

The victim might not even be aware that they have been hacked, she added.

Larger company budgets to increase cyber security and knowledge on smartphones for their users are necessary, experts warned, adding an active approach against cyber-crime is needed, given that virus scanners are often one or two years behind the newest virus types.