HMRC prevented £103m of attempted fraud from government systems

HMRC the target of phishing and other cyber attacks

HMRC prevented frauds totalling more than £103m in 2014-15, according to the government's UK Cyber Security Strategy annual report.

The Cabinet Office said that government systems presented "an attractive target to cyber criminals and the threat had grown significantly over the life of the [National Cyber Security] Programme", which was established in 2010.

As an example, it claimed that HMRC took down almost 1,000 fraudulent websites in 2012, with this figure rising to more than 11,000 in 2015.

HMRC established a dedicated cyber security team back in 2012 to help secure government finances against cyber threats, the Cabinet Office added. "The team assisted in the prevention of frauds totalling more than £103m in 2014-15," it stated.

To combat online fraud, HMRC has set up a Cyber Security Command Centre to correlate data across multiple sources in a bid to identify potential anomalous or malicious behaviour.

Back in 2013, Mike Hainey, head of analytics at HMRC, told Computing that the organisation was trawling the internet, including social media and other websites in which people share information, in a bid to find potential evidence of tax fraud that it can feed into its Connect data warehouse.

HMRC has also been providing cyber security advice to taxpayers, including raising awareness of phishing attacks using fake emails purporting to come from HMRC. Between April and December 2015, HMRC's cyber security pages were viewed more than 800,000 times, the document said.

Last month, the City of London Police's Action Fraud and National Fraud Intelligence Bureau said that nearly 100,000 people in the UK had reported receiving phishing scam emails in 2015.

The exact number of reported cases between January 2015 and December 2015 was 96,699 - with an average of 8,000 reports per month.