FOI reference: FOI-2026-3468
You asked
I would like to request a dataset of recorded social engineering attacks in the United Kingdom from 2020 to the present date. Where held, I ask that the data be provided with the following fields for each incident:
- title: A short descriptive title for the incident
- date: The reported date or initial date of the incident in YYYY-MM-DD format
- location: Country (United Kingdom only)
- region: The UK region in which the incident occurred. Mainly: England, Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland
- city: The city/county/town that the incident occurred in (if data is available)
- type: The category of social engineering attack, for example: phishing, vishing, smishing, impersonation, pretexting, baiting, or quid-pro-quo
- severity: The severity classification of the incident. Classification such as: critical, high, medium, or low.
- summary: A brief narrative description of the incident (if data is available)
- sector: The sector targeted, classification such as: healthcare, finance, education, government, retail, energy, transport, or tech
- affected_count: The number of individuals or organisations affected (0 if unknown)
If the data is not held in this exact structure, I would be grateful to receive it in whatever format is available.
If any part of this request falls outside the scope of information held by the ONS, I would greatly appreciate being directed to the appropriate public authority, for example the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Action Fraud, or the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
We said
Thank you for your request.
We produce data relating to crime statistics from two main sources: The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and crime recorded by the police. Neither of these sources hold incident-level data on specific types of social engineering attacks in the detail requested.
However, the CSEW does include fraud and computer misuse offences. Please note that these data relate to England and Wales only, not the whole of the UK and only measure crime experienced by households not by businesses.
Table A1 in our Crime in England and Wales: Appendix tables shows the CSEW estimates for fraud and computer misuse incidents for the time period requested. In this table, fraud is split by different types of fraud, and computer misuse offences are further split into computer virus and unauthorised access to personal information offences (including hacking).
Our Nature of crime: fraud and computer misuse also contains information about the impact on victims and offender characteristics for fraud and computer misuse incidents.
For data relating to Scotland, please contact Justice_Analysts@gov.scot. For data relating to Northern Ireland, please contact zCSUwebstats@psni.pnn.police.uk.
If you have any further crime-related enquiries, the ONS Centre for Crime and Justice can be reached at the following email address CrimeStatistics@ons.gov.uk.