News that cybercrime costs the UK more than £27bn a year should not come as a surprise, and the figure could be masking higher occurrences of cybercrime, warns McAfee.

Greg Day, director of Security Strategy for McAfee, told FST that these figures should not stun the UK since research carried out by the security and risk management services provider last year showed that globally, cybercrime costs around $1trn per year.

“I suspect that this figure is an underestimation,” he said. “It is quite easy to quantify the impact to businesses: downtime and value of information, ‘X’ per cent of customers were compromised, and £X was taken; what we can’t do today and really there are efforts between government, law enforcement and security industry, is to quantify day-to-day pick pocketing that happens online,” such as scams and purchases through fake websites.

“It is easy to do the maths on big numbers, but tough with the day-to-day, and to quantify what is the scope of the problem.”

Day said this is a first figure, and there is the realization that we can’t easily quantify this problem.

The Government revealed that attacks on computer systems, industrial espionage and theft of company secrets costs businesses alone at least £21bn per year.

Baroness Neville-Jones, security minister, said the answer to the problem lies in private firms, and the Government working together to disrupt criminal networks, rather than enforcing prosecution.

She said the answer lies in “screwing up their network” – just as an intruder can “screw up” a company’s network, the reverse can happen.

Day said a big part of the answer lies in coordinating between the security industry, the Government and the public. The first thing is to have methodology in place for establishing the scope for the UK.

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