You might recall that last week, consultant firm Detica produced a report on the overall cost of cyber-crime in the UK, in conjunction with the government Office of Cyber Security. The damage of which was calculated to be £27 billion per year lopped off the British economy, a rather staggering figure to claim. Of course, it’s very difficult to quantify these sort of measurements.

A professor from the London School of Economics was certainly unimpressed with this estimation, and pointed out an interesting fact – that Detica is owned by BAE Systems, and the whole report was a “sales promotion exercise” on behalf of the latter. Peter Sommer told ComputerWeekly: “The whole report has been orientated to areas in which BAE can offer its facilities and services.

He noted that entire swathes of cyber-crime offences were discarded by the report, with child pornography perhaps the biggest problem area which was ignored. He added: “It seems rather unfortunate that OCSIA [the Office of Cyber Security], who have to make important and careful decisions about spending taxpayers’ money, should ally themselves to a sales promotion exercise by a BAE subsidiary.”

In another separate investigation of cyber-crime damage to the economy, Symantec estimated a much smaller (but still substantial) figure of £1.9 billion. There’s certainly a world of difference between the two figures.