Business: Cybercrime

(asked on 4th November 2014) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of business awareness of cyber-crime; and what information her Department holds on financial loss resulting from cyber-attacks.


Answered by
Karen Bradley Portrait
Karen Bradley
This question was answered on 11th November 2014

The Government makes no specific assessment of business awareness of Cyber Crime. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills conducts an annual Information Security Breaches Survey which gathers a range of data from businesses. In the 2014 survey 79% of respondents said that company management placed a high or very high priority on security. 68% of large organisations and 54% of small businesses provide ongoing security awareness training to their staff.

Estimating the costs of cyber crime is challenging. The UK cyber security strategy noted "a truly robust estimate will probably never be established, but it is clear the costs are high and rising". Research used in the strategy suggested that costs to UK could be in the order of £27 billion per year. The Home Office has been focussing on improving and expanding the data on the prevalence of different types of cyber crime in order to develop more informed estimates of cost of cyber crime. The Home Office has set up a new external working group to improve those estimates.

Reticulating Splines