As 2025 winds down, business leaders and executives will feel it has been a particularly expensive year as the cost of employment shot up, inflation of raw materials impacted supply chains and both oil and tariff shocks hit in the first half of the year, writes Karl Matchett, business and money editor at The Independent, the widely popular British online newspaper founded in 1986.
But perhaps the biggest cost of all was one borne by companies hit by cyberattacks.
One damning government report suggests that close to half of British businesses and three in 10 charities claimed to have suffered a type of cybersecurity breach or attack in the past year. These include anything from a phishing attack to a full-blown digital shutdown costing hundreds of millions of pounds.
Marks and Spencer. Adidas. Co-op Group. Heathrow airport. Harrods. And, of course, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). Each has suffered publicly confirmed cyber hacks. These attacks were not limited to companies either: the German parliament also suffered a breach and, in October, the UK government saw the Foreign Office hacked.
What did the hacks cost? Cybersecurity Ventures, a noted source of data and research in the cybersecurity sphere, says the entire (cybercrime) “industry” was worth around $10.5 trillion (£7.8 trillion) this year alone. In country terms, this would make it the third-biggest economy in the world after only the US and China.
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