The 2012 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: United Kingdom is independently conducted by Ponemon Institute. The benchmark study, sponsored by HP Enterprise Security is based on a representative sample of 38 organisations in various industry sectors.

Cyber attacks generally refer to criminal activity conducted via the Internet. These attacks can include stealing an organisation’s intellectual property, confiscating online bank accounts, creating and distributing viruses on other computers, posting confidential business information on the Internet and disrupting a country’s critical national infrastructure.

Disruption to business processes and revenue losses create the highest costs for organisations following a cyber attack.

Key takeaways from this report include:

• Cyber crimes are costly. We found that the average annualised cost of cyber crime for the 38 organisations in our study is £2.1 million per year, with a range of £.4 million to £7.7 million.

• Cyber attacks have become common occurrences. The companies in our study experienced 41 successful attacks per week or 1.1 successful attacks per organisation per week.

• The most costly cyber crimes are those caused by malicious insiders, denial of services, and malicious code. Mitigation of such attacks requires enabling technologies such as SIEM, intrusion prevention systems, application security testing and enterprise governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) solutions.

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Ponemon Institute is dedicated to independent research and education that advances responsible information and privacy management practices within business and government. Our mission is to conduct high quality, empirical studies on critical issues affecting the management and security of sensitive information about people and organisations.