Russian cyber attacks carry a one in 10 chance each year of costing the UK economy at least £4bn, according to modelling by Moody's that the Mirror reported on Saturday.
The assessment, which the paper said Moody's carried out on behalf of the Labour MP Graeme Downie, also found that Russia accounts for as much as 80% of all losses from state-sponsored cyber threats, the Mirror reported. It said a single successful attack could cost every Briton £100, a figure it reached by dividing £4bn between 40.8 million taxpayers.
The figures go further than Downie's own published estimates. On 7 October the MP for Dunfermline and Dollar released The Putin Tax, a report co-written with Dr Dominic Reed, which put the annual cost of Russian hostile activity to the UK at £2bn to £2.5bn and described that figure as a floor.
That report carried separate modelling by the cyber analytics firm CyberCube, which put the chance of a single large attack lower and its cost smaller than the figures now attributed to Moody's. Alex Tenenbaum, CyberCube's director of services, said at the time: "We estimate that there is a 5% chance in a given year that the UK will experience a single attack by a hostile threat actor that would cost all impacted companies $4.4 billion (£3.3 billion)."
The Mirror's report does not say what period the 80% share covers, how the losses were measured or which part of Moody's produced the work. Moody's is a ratings and risk analytics company rather than an insurer, although it sells cyber risk models to the insurance industry. The paper's report describes the £4bn both as a yearly cost and as the cost of one attack.
Downie told the Mirror that a single Russia-linked cyber attack could cost the UK more than £4bn and said Britons were paying a "hidden Putin tax" as a result of Russian aggression. He called for a tough response.
His October report broke its £2bn to £2.5bn estimate into three parts: £400m to £500m a year in average losses from major incidents since 2022, including attacks on Jaguar Land Rover, the Royal Mail and NHS suppliers; £1.47bn in estimated losses from Russia-linked cyber attacks, assuming Russia accounts for a tenth of the £14.7bn in annual cyber losses to UK businesses estimated in government-commissioned research; and £250m to £500m in potential exposure from damage to undersea cables. The UK government has not formally attributed the Jaguar Land Rover attack to Russia.
CyberCube counted more than 300 Russia-linked cyber incidents affecting UK-headquartered companies since 2022, a figure it said was likely to be a significant undercount.
The report's executive summary said: "Far from being solely a national security challenge, Russian hostile activity represents a significant and recurring economic cost that British taxpayers and businesses are already paying every year."
Downie's parliamentary questions established that ministers held no estimate of the economic impact of incidents linked to the Kremlin. The report recommends that the government publish an annual economic assessment of hostile foreign-state activity and that the National Cyber Security Centre attach cost estimates to its attributions.
A government spokesperson said in October, when the report was published: "We have been clear that Russia's continued hybrid attacks are egregious and wholly unacceptable. This government has taken tough action — expelling Russian intelligence officers, sanctioning the GRU, clamping down on illicit finance networks and ensuring Russia's criminal proxies are disrupted and brought to justice."
Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institute, who wrote the foreword to the October report, has endorsed the attempt to put a price on Russian activity while stressing that the figures are approximate.
The Prime Minister has said he will look at what more can be done to monitor the cost of Russian hostile activity after Downie told the Commons that no department collects the information, according to the UK Defence Journal.
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