Awareness of cybercrime among the general public tends to be quite poor, according to Norton.

This could mean that IT contractors do not have a realistic idea of how bad the problem is.

Norton senior director of consumer products Dan Nadir noted that many people do not actually tend to think about cybercrime until they are a victim themselves.

He noted: "Official statistics are likely to be conservative, as many people do not know who to turn to in the event of a cyber attack, which means it is usually left unreported."

More than 40 million UK users regularly use the internet, which now hosts more than five billion gigabytes of data.

In a recent speech to the CBI forum, culture secretary Ed Vaizey underlined the importance of the web to UK users, particularly when it comes to privacy.

He was commenting following a series of high profile data breaches worldwide, including one by Google which resulted in a fine by the French regulator.