Brits Have £361 Billion Waiting for Cyber Criminals

The conservative Brits are big time spenders on the Internet, as study of YouGov said, conducted on 1,942 surfers. Each had an average of £10,077 easily accessible to online fraudsters, and that is only via the typical schemes used by the cyber criminals, no further work on coming up with something new required.

The collective worth of the UK inhabitants that deal online is of £361 billion, included in banking, gaming and shopping accounts. Much to the surprise of the researchers, nearly half of the Brit surfers claim to have been targeted and suffered after an attack from cyber criminals, and 78 percent are worried it could happen to them. That’s many who fear it might happen again, and there’s nothing quite as annoying as falling for the second time for a money-alleviating scheme.

Two thirds of the respondents have admitted to accessing their banks online, 58 percent use online retailers and almost a third share personal information on public web sites, a heaven for online fraudsters. "It is no surprise that online banks and retailers are some of the most popular targets for identity theft since so many personal details are required by users. […] As online transactions increase, we need to acknowledge the importance of technology and consumer behaviour in protecting personal details and monetary assets online," Jon Kerr, the SSL manger at VeriSign UK, told vnu.co.uk.

The net worth of all the UK users might look very appealing to cyber criminals, but at the same time, the Tories have come up with a system that is set to fight against online crime and have presented it yesterday at the annual e-Crime conference. "There is no incentive on the banks to report fraudulent activity and there is no incentive for the police to report or do anything about it – you are left with the conclusion that [the government] doesn't want to do anything about the problem," Shadow home secretary David Davis said, after launching the Conservative Green Paper on e-crime.

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