Cyber threats to the UK remain a Tier-One national security risk, and the UK’s Cyber Security Strategy identifies criminal use of cyberspace as one of the three principal threats to UK cyber-security alongside state and terrorist use.
As the number of internet users and ease of access increases, and more and more of the nation’s public and private assets are stored electronically rather than physically (often outside UK jurisdiction), so too do opportunities grow for individuals to exploit the internet for criminal ends. According to the National Crime Agency, ‘If there is a single cross-cutting issue that has changed the landscape for serious and organised crime and our response against it, it is the growth in scale and speed of internet communication technologies.’
Open-source analysis reveals that the scale and reach of cyber-crime are perceived to be increasing. Cyber-criminals rapidly identify potential vulnerabilities in new and evolving technology, exploiting them to unlawfully acquire data or disrupt systems, typically for financial gain. Like all types of crime, cyber-crimes are committed by both opportunistic individuals and organised crime groups (OCGs), and the public, businesses and government are all at risk.
So says a threat assessment, produced by the National Security and Resilience Studies department at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the Whitehall, London-based defence think-tank. To read the document in full, visit the RUSI website – https://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/201406_BP_The_Threat_of_Cyber-Crime_to_the_UK.pdf.
The author, Calum Jeffray, a Research Analyst in the National Security and Resilience programme at RUSI, says that understanding the scale of cyber-crime, how it is changing over time and the impact of interventions to tackle it are key priorities for policy-makers. However, the scale of such crime in the UK and its cost to the economy have proved challenging to quantify with any degree of confidence. This is largely because of the unclear methodologies or metrics used to measure online criminal activity, as well as the challenges of cross-border activity and confusion and ambiguity over much of the terminology associated with cyber-crime. Under-reporting and inadequate recording of such crimes represent further challenges.
