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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