Does cybercrime really cost the UK more than drugs?

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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The UK government has today published a report into the cost of cybercrime, concluding that the overall cost to the UK economy from cybercrime is £27bn per year.

Wow. £27 billion a year is a huge amount of money. It’s even more staggering when you compare it to other problems that Britain faces. For instance, drug-related crime is estimated to cost the UK £13.9 billion a year.

Unfortunately the report, which was compiled for the Office of Cyber Security & Information Assurance by security consultancy Detica, doesn’t give any real detail of how it came by the number.

It does break the £27 billion cybercrime total down into different categories – for instance, £9.2 billion comes from theft of intellectual property (IP), and £7.6 billion is calculated for industrial espionage – but the report acknowledges that calculating such figures is “complex” because such incidents are typically not reported.

Well, hate to ask an obvious question but… if…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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