'National e-crime unit needed'
10/04/2008 10:16:13
Almost 75 per cent of UK businesses want a new national body to tackle e-crime, an industry report has revealed.
The Invisible Crime: A Business Crime Survey, conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce, questioned 3,900 businesses nationwide on the nature and effects of crime on companies.
The survey found that 94 per cent of businesses have suffered from spam emails in the last year, while 31 per cent claimed to have been victims of phishing attacks.
In addition, 23 per cent have suffered from spyware infection and 19 per cent have experienced data loss due to viruses.
"What we want to see is a national body that can take action, because obviously computer crime is not location specific and does not fit in to regional police forces," said BCC policy advisor Gareth Elliott.
The report also found that measures to boost IT security had been implemented by the majority of businesses with 77 per cent using spam filtering software, 74 per cent backing up data and 70 per cent storing data off site.
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