14 DAY TRIAL // According to a joint government and industry report, the annual loses to cyber crime in the United Kingdom are of £27 billion, of which £21 billion comes from the business sector.
The report was drafted by the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance in collaboration with Detica, a company specializing in information intelligence.
The study shows that the main victim of cyber crime is the business sector, which accounts for over ¾ of the loses.
Intellectual property theft is the most costly form of cyber crime to businesses and results in £9.2 billion annual losses.
In this case, IP theft does not refer to illegal file sharing, but to the theft of trade secrets, ideas, designs, methodologies and so on.
The industry sectors most affected by this type of crimes are pharmaceutical/biotech, with over £1.8bn loses, electronic and electrical equipment, with over £1.7bn, and software and computer services, with £1.6bn.
A separate cyber criminal activity costing businesses £7.6bn every year is industrial espionage, which results in the loss of non-IP, but competitiveness-related information.
For example, knowledge about planned mergers and acquisitions can allow attackers to predict and take advantage of share price movements.
The financial services sector is most affected by this type of crime with loses estimated at over £2bn. It is followed by mining, with over £1.5bn, and aerospace & defence, with over £1.2bn.
Other cyber crimes that seirously affect businesses are extortion (£1.2bn), direct online theft (£1.3bn), and customer data theft (£1bn).
As far as loses suffered by citizens go, they are estimated at £3.1bn, of which £1.7bn is the direct result of identity theft, £1.4bn of online scams and £30m of scareware.
The government is also losing money to cyber crooks at an estimated rate of £2.2bn per year, mainly due to tax, NHS and pension fraud.
"Cyber crime is a national scale issue [...]. For the cyber criminals – who may be individuals, organised crime groups or even nation states – it is highly lucrative and the barriers to entry are low.
"The ease of access to and relative anonymity provided by ICT lowers the risk of being caught while making crimes straightforward to conduct," the report warns.