Cyber crime costs the UK economy £27bn a year, the government has said.
Businesses are the hardest hit losing £21 billion to hackers, while UK citizens lost out to the tune of £3.1 billion and the government was £2.2 billion out of pocket.
The total cost of cyber crime was also placed at much higher than £27 billion as getting a grip on the problem has been difficult, because of firms not wanting to admit they have been targeted for fear of damage to their reputation.
Security minister, Baroness Neville-Jones has said the government is determined to work in tandem with industry to tackle cyber crime.
Around a third of the £21 billion cost to business was made up of industrial espionage, such as stealing designs and commercial secrets.
Direct online theft cost business £1.3bn and some £1bn was lost through theft of customer data. The hardest-hit sectors were pharmaceuticals, biotech, electronics, IT and chemicals.
Andy Philpott, Websense VP of sales for UK and Ireland comments: “When we see a figure of £21 billion it really highlights the level of damage that cyber criminals are doing to UK businesses,” says Philpott. “Modern hackers use blended attacks to steal data –these attacks target a number of different channels, such as e-mail, web pages and social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
“Traditional security products are ineffective against these attacks as they only protect certain parts of the network, leaving other parts without a fighting chance. Cybercrime is clearly big business in the UK and only a truly unified security architecture – which protects mobile workers and branch offices – can handle this next generation of security threat,” Philpot concluded.