Computer crime cost UK companies £145m last year, according to research by IBM.

The Information at Risk report, released at the InfoSecurity show this week, says that organisations are still not treating security seriously enough.

'I don't think anybody will be surprised by the size of this,' Peter Joplin, Tivoli Security manager at IBM Software told Computing.

'Most people don't want to admit to such breaches and a lot of organisations don't know what is going on because they don't have systems that can highlight this,' he said.

Previous projections of the cost of computer crime have assumed that monetary losses are caused by virus attacks.

But the IBM report suggests that much of the cost of is associated with the theft of data and intellectual property.

'This all comes down to whether or not we have the technology in place to pick up these things,' Joplin said.

'It's about how you monitor your information. People say they have a firewall and think they're secure. But if the firewall port is opened, for example, and you don't monitor it, you don't know what's been taken or what's been left behind.'

Joplin says the problem will become worse before it gets better and we should expect this year's figure to be far higher.

'I don't think the majority of organisations understand that this is the issue,' Joplin said. 'This is just the tip of the iceberg.'

Nick Coleman, IBM's European head of security services and author of the report, says companies find it difficult to quantify the true cost of lapses in computer security.

'This report underlines the need for them to start to capture information within their company that would validate the estimates they can make,' he said.

IBM used data from the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the US Computer Security Unit.