A recent study confirmed that cyber attacks have caused £8 billion loss to consumers of UK Financial Services in 2016. ThreatMetrix, a security watchdog that monitors 20 billion online transactions per year was the one which prepared the report and predicted that the consequences may deteriorate further in this year.
ThreatMetrix says that the spike in fraud is due to an increase in online financial services. As consumers are increasingly opting for digital transactions due to greater trust and ease of use; the threat index is also growing on a proportionate note.
Furthermore, ThreatMetrix has listed out the following 3, as the most common cyber crimes resulting in financial losses in the United Kingdom
Bank Account Fraud- More than 2,356,000 cyber crimes of the said sort were committed in the year 2016 says the ThreatMetrix report. Phishing or emails containing malware attachments tops this crime list. A 2015 report of Verizon on data breach investigations confirmed that more than 43 percent of people became victims to phishing emails last year.
Non-Investment Fraud- Mainly senior citizens are targeted in this cyber crime which is also known as Ponzi schemes. As per ThreatMetrix, more than 1,028,000 people fall victim to such crimes.
Computer Virus victims- the UK witnessed more than 1,340,000 people falling prey to virus related cyber crimes and this includes ransomware victims the most.
As ThreatMetrix did not cover the organizations/businesses that fell victim to cyber attacks in the UK, a research firm called Timico filled this vacuum.
Timico which carried out a survey of more than 1000 UK companies on this note said that more than half of the companies have been a victim of cyber attack/s in last 18 months. And of the affected businesses, more than 360 of them paid £5,000 ransom to free their locked data.
Therefore, companies operating in the UK should start to learn the way to acknowledge the increasing and evolving variants of cyber threats by instilling a policy that helps educate staff and individuals to isolate themselves from all kinds of cyber-threats.
Otherwise, if left unattended, the cyber threats are having a potential to instinct a lot of pain into the economy of UK.
