A new report (PDF) from the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) details the billions of euros that are being lost through cybercrime which are not being reported.  According to the report on the EUobserver website, the ENISA report concludes that “although large outages and large data breaches receive extensive media coverage…many breaches, however, remain undetected and if detected, are not reported to authorities and not known to the public.”

The report, Cyber incident reporting in the EU, “highlighted five major cyber incidents which all went unreported, including an ‘IP hacking’ case in April 2010 where China Telecom fed incorrect routing information instructing US and other international Internet traffic to feed through Chinese servers, swallowing 15 percent of global Internet use in less than 20 minutes.”

The authors of the report, Dr. Marnix Dekker and Chris Karsberg, “admitted that cyber incidents are most commonly kept secret when discovered, leaving customers and policymakers in the dark about frequency, impact and root causes.” As a result, the “lack of transparency and lack of information makes it difficult for policy makers to understand overall impact,” which in turn, “complicates the effort in the industry to understand and address cyber security incidents.”