BAE Systems Detica today launched its Cyber Defence Service to prevent sophisticated cyber threats.

Previously only available to government and select private sector clients, the technology, which utilises techniques pioneered in national security defence and organised cyber crime prevention, is now available to the commercial market.

The system will offer ‘unique behavioural analysis based on massive-scale compute cloud technology to detect signs of potential compromise’. A team of expert cyber analysts will also be supporting the system, ensuring that previously ‘unseen and unchecked’ attacks on existing network defences are investigated.

Henry Harrison, technical director at Detica, said that “we see too many companies still believing that traditional defences are enough to protect them from targeted cyber attacks. Businesses need to decide whether they’re going to try and do something to fight back against these threats, or whether they want to resign themselves to being – in effect – “open source” organizations”.

The launch comes on the back of a government-commissioned Detica report entitled ‘The Cost of Cyber-Crime’ published in February 2011. The study claimed that UK organisations lost a total of £27 billion from cyber-theft in 2010, and cyber-theft of corporate secrets accounting for £17billion of that.

However the report, which examines the state of IT security and the nature and extent of cyber-crime damage, has been dismissed as “far from clear” by the pressure group Straight Statistics, which challenged the “haphazard” measures used in the report. The report also suggested that the actual figure may be lower than lower than the £27 billion estimated in the report.