Online identity firm Garlik's cybercrime report claims that more than 3.5 million online crimes were committed in the UK last year.

In 2007, the sharpest rise was in online financial fraud, with more than 250,000 incidents reported in 2007; a 20% rise on the previous year.

The report highlighted a growing professionalism among online criminals, with personal and credit details being traded online.

Retailers alone lost more than £270m in 2007 from internet fraud. And that's just the figures reported by banks.
These numbers are a shadow of the real figure. Pretty much everyone who goes online will be the subject of some kind of internet crime, be it phishing emails, virus attacks or malware.

It is believed that these figures will increase even further this year with cyber-crime being fuelled by the financial crisis.
Some tips we recommend to help improve online security include:

Always use an Anti Virus and a Firewall. Windows has a built in firewall which should be activated or a free one is available from Comodo. AVG and Avast distribute free copies of their antivirus.

We would also recommend Anti-Spyware such as Search and Destroy (free) or Ad-Aware

Ideally we would recommend purchasing a security suite as they tend to offer as much protection as possible. At Dolphin Promotions we use Kaspersky as we find it to use fewer resources than other suites such as McAfee

We suggest using Firefox over Internet Explorer as it tends to be more secure. For the maximum possible protection we also recommend NoScript which prevents websites running JavaScript until you white list the site. This prevents websites that have been hacked into trying to install malicious software on your computer. However this can be quite frustrating for novice users as you need to enable it on each new site you visit.

We also highly advise you to use long alphanumeric passwords for anything that is important; we also recommend you use multiple passwords for different sites. We also recommend you never log in to a site when you have followed the link from an email. Type in the URL directly into your address bar or search for the website you want via Google, this will help avoid any phishing attacks.