One-third of European Businesses Don’t Report E-Crime

One third of businesses in Europe don’t report information security crimes and breaches despite being subject to attempted e-crime every day, says a new study. Why won’t companies report on the attack?

According to an article on Britain’s Security Park website, the study by Infosecurity Europe found businesses struggled to establish at what point it becomes sensible to report it. “There is a balance to be made between the company’s responsibility to report crime in order to prevent and predict incidents in the wider business community and the clear material loss from reputational damage,” the article says.

“From my experience as a media lawyer, reporting crime to the police is a double edged sword as invariably the press have found out about the incident within 24 hours of reporting it to the police, creating a real PR risk,” media lawyer Jonathan Coad from Swan Turton, told the publication.

But Tony Neate, Managing Director, GetSafeOnline told the publication, “to be effective, we need to know what the scale of the problem is, this can only be measured if we report incidents when they occur. How and who we report to is a matter for debate, whether it is the ISP, bank, or local police. Without collating the scale of the e-crime problem, we will never truly be aware of the cost to society at large and the measures that need to be put in place to fight it.”