Office for National Statistics releases crime report

Last week, the Office for National Statistics released some sobering crime stats for the year ending March 2016.  For the first year, and not before time, cybercrime has been included in the survey; worryingly this has nearly doubled the total of all crime incidents recorded. There were 5.8 million cybercrimes from 2015-16, which means one in ten adults in the UK have been a victim of cybercrime in the past year, making it the most prevalent crime in the UK.

The 5.8 million ONS figure is only just below the total figure of 6.3 million total other offences, and offers the first official and startling glimpse of the scale of the problem posed by cybercrime. Another interesting revelation is that fraud – once a crime almost reserved for the corporate world – is now the most common type of crime in the survey, with 3.8 of the 5.8 million cases of online fraud being reported.

Whilst a sad reflection of the times in which we live, to Intercede, this news comes as little surprise. Cybersecurity protocols have long been inadequate, designed in a bygone age, and then left to stagnate: the fact that this is the first year such crimes have been included in the ONS report is indicative of a widespread blasé attitude toward it. For example, the continued widespread popularity of username/password systems has got to come to an end if the growth of cybercrime is to be brought to a halt: especially as the ‘Internet of Things’ and its connected devices become an ever more engrained part of our lives, integrated as it is now with cars, houses and medical equipment.

Intercede asserts that digital trust needs to be baked into the very fabric of digital interactions at every level, from the silicon chips and devices, to the users identities, the devices they use, services and apps they consume and connections across which their data passes.  Put simply, what we call Digital Trust from Silicon to Services, is a fool-proof cybersecurity model, with identities verified and authenticated at every link in the chain between physical silicon chips, all the way up to services/data in the cloud. To find out more, check out our product pages at www.intercede.com.

Take a look at the ONS report for yourself here.

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