Computer crimes

What's the real cost of theft? From a society's view point, the cost is not that somebody stole your bike because somebody stealing your bike is just a reassignment of ownership, the total number of bikes in the world didn't change and that your loss is totally offset by the gain from the theft. The real cost as identified many years ago by a Nobel prize winning economist is the waste that comes with you trying to protect your bike (i.e. checking it out from time to time, putting chain locks) and the waste that comes with a budding thief investing time and energy figuring out new and more efficient ways to steal (he could be doing something more productive for society).

Now what does that have to do with computers? With computer viruses and spams is the problem the same? I think it's greater. When your computer melts it does not get transferred to somebody else's cubicle (unless your information got stolen at the same time). When a virus wipes out your hard drive, not only the information lost counts among the costs but also the stuff that you need to be doing from now on (creating backups, firewalls, running virus checks from time to time). Is trying to learn how to hack a computer wasteful? probably not as much as we think if we think that skills learned to hack a computer is complementary to other supposedly productive skills (i.e. like being able to write code for a search engine).