For the first time, the Crime Survey of England and Wales from the Office of National Statstics has included cyber crime offences, recording an estimated 2.5m cyber offences for the year ending June 2015.
These were comprimsed of 404,000 incidents of unauthorised access to personal information, which includes hacking, and 2.05m incidents of computer viruses.
Overall, there were 2.1m victims of computer misuse, with 46 adults in every 1000 falling victim to the crime.
Louise Pordage, Senior Manager in KPMG’s cyber security practice, believes that we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg with this new data. She said: “While the figures released today may appear high, I am certain that cyber crime remains one of the most under reported areas in our crime statistics."
"There is little clarity around the impact of cyber crime against the UK economy, and of course the statistics released today only consider crimes against the person rather than corporate crime."
techUK’s James Murphy echoed the concerns of Pordage, with the Defence and Security associate director saying: "Given these crimes are often under-reported, it’s likely the actual figures are even higher than those published today.
"The only way we can successfully tackle the growing threat to people and businesses is for police, industry and victim support to work together to better protect and prevent against such crimes."
