Microsoft researchers says those scary vendor reports warning about the value of cyber crime losses are mostly bunk. That’s because they are based on surveys, and surveys are easy to bias.

The researchers detail their findings in a paper entitled, “Sex, Lies and Cyber Crime Surveys. Dinie Florencio and Cormac Herley said the vendor surveys give too much weight to a few large examples. Because losses are self-reported, survey data are hard to verify. The research point out that surveys are not only misleading, they disagree with one another.

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