The CEO of Symantec says intellectual property theft is a greater cyber security threat than cyber war and malicious attacks from hackers.
Steve Bennett said western firms had been orchestrating cyber attacks to steal intellectual property, resulting in potentially dangerous consequences for the global economy.
Bennett said companies and governments should share more data about attackers because they’re losing a war against ‘black hat’ hackers.
Bennett told the Financial Times that the major reason of concern comes from the economic threat if intellectual property is transferred from IP creators to countries with lower costs.
"It will have a big negative impact on global economic growth," Bennett added.
According to reports from Kroll, the number of firms experiencing external cyber attacks, aimed at stealing commercial secrets, doubled during 2012-13 than last year.
Information theft is the second most common form of scam following the physical stealing of assets.
"While we’re making best efforts that aren’t producing results, the bad guys are getting more sophisticated and the consequences of breaches are going up," Bennett said.
Recently, Adobe was hit with a massive hacking attack, in which personal information of more than 38 million Adobe customer accounts was compromised, which is far bigger than the earlier detailed 2.9 million users.
