At the beginning of October, Policing Minister Vernon
Coaker announced the launch of a new £7m policing
unit to tackle cyber crime and Internet fraud.
But while the Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) was
welcomed in some quarters, there have already been concerns
voiced by politicians, IT experts and businesses about the
relatively small amount of funding available to target a
multi-billion pound criminal industry, and questions over
the Government's real level of commitment to cracking down
on Internet crime.
There's little doubt that the Government needed to take
some sort of action on Internet crime as, since the closure
of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2006, there
have been claims of a major gap in the fight against cyber
criminals. The NHTCU had been a high profile organisation,
launched amidst a blaze of publicity and with £25m of
funding. By comparison the e-crime unit of the Serious and
Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) was a much more reserved
organisation, with a lower profile. Unfortunately that
approach has been interpreted by some businesses as
representing a lack of support for those being targeted by
online criminals.
In March this year, Catherine Bowen, head of crime policy
at the British Retail Consortium, said that SOCA had failed
to maintain the links developed between industry and the
NHTCU, and that the retail sector seemed "to have fallen
off the bottom of the scale" as far as policing was
concerned since the Unit had been merged with SOCA. There
were similar fears raised by the Confederation of British
Industry and the Federation of Small Businesses, which
described the policing arrangements on cyber crime as
"lamentable".
In fact SOCA has had more impressive results than many
realised. The Agency's 2007-08 report, published in May
this year, highlighted notable cyber crime success
including Operation Ajowan, which broke up a web-based
crime ring where criminals traded stolen bank, credit and
identity information that could have cost the UK finance
sector at least £6m.
SOCA also sent out 46 alerts to UK business, including 11
alerts to UK financial institutions detailing more than
46,000 online account details that had been compromised by
phishing and virus attacks.
But while the Agency rightly stated that there were now
more staffing resources targeted directly at Internet crime
than in the days of the NHTCU, it was also clear that cyber
criminals were not a major priority for SOCA, at least not
compared with the government-set priorities of
drug-trafficking, organised immigration crime and fraud.
Many business organisations and IT experts were instead
pinning their hopes on the proposals put forward by ACPO
and the Metropolitan Police Service for the PCeU and,
despite delays on funding, those proposals finally came to
fruition at the beginning of October.
The new unit will receive £3.5m of Government funding
and £3.9m from the Met over three years, and will be
based within the Met, under the leadership of Deputy
Assistant Commissioner Jane Williams of the Serious Crime
Directorate. It will be a national resource working
alongside the National Fraud Reporting Centre and the
National Fraud Intelligence Bureau to support the
development of the police response to online crime across
the country. But its work will not overlap with the
existing remit of SOCA's e-crime unit, or the Child
Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.
DAC Williams, who became the ACPO lead on e-crime in April
this year, said the unit would become a 'centre of
excellence' for combating cyber criminals. "We have worked
closely with the Home Office, City of London Police and
SOCA to address e-crime issues and bring this unit to
fruition," she added.
"Electronic crime is a growing phenomenon of the 21st
Century and has the potential to affect us all. This unit
will provide a law enforcement solution and work towards
limiting the impact of this crime on society."
From next spring the PCeU will co-ordinate law enforcement
of all online offences and lead national investigations
into the most serious cyber-crime. It will also train
officers in local forces in dealing with high-tech crimes,
and it will work with the National Policing Improvement
Agency to identify how e-crime reports made to local forces
are handled. But it will not centrally collate all reports
of e-crime from the 44 forces of England and Wales,
including the BTP. Other key aims for the PCeU include:
· the intelligence-led disruption of e-crime,
· analysing and developing intelligence on computer
crime to produce actionable operational products, in
collaboration with other agencies, · developing a
network of police, government and industry partners on
e-crime, · the provision of education and
preventative advice about e-crime to industry and the
public, · promoting standards for training,
procedure and response to e-crime, and ·
investigating serious e-crime incidents that fall within
the Case Acceptance Criteria.
So has the launch of the new unit satisfied the concerns
voiced by so many? Not quite. Within days of the launch of
the PCeU, experts were already querying the level of
funding for the unit. David Roberts, chief executive of the
Corporate IT Forum (Tif), said: "£7m over three years
seems a very small sum for a very large problem. We doubt
whether it will be enough to tackle an issue that the Home
Office itself calls a global menace."
A survey by Tif - published earlier this month - of more
than 50 of the UK's main IT users found that 68 per cent of
chief security officers spend up to 40 per cent of their
total security budget on tackling e-crime. Yet despite that
level of cyber-crime, businesses were described as "so
disillusioned" by the lack of support from the police that
only four per cent of companies said they always report
e-crime attacks, with the majority, 57 per cent, saying
they "didn't feel the crimes would be investigated
properly". Politicians have added their voices to the
concerns about Internet crime, calling for more money to
fund the PCeU. In a recent Parliamentary debate on Internet
fraud, Conservative MP Nigel Evans said that the £7m
"may not be enough and the Government may need to look at
that again." S
hadow crime reduction minister, James Brokenshire said that
while he welcomed the launch of the PCeU, "we should be
under no allusions that the Police Central e-Crime Unit is
a panacea. There is the question over the resources it will
have and the abilities it will have.
"E-crime is the most rapidly expanding form of crime in
this country. If this government does not take e-crime
seriously it reinforces in the mind of the criminal that
this country is a soft touch."
Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake added: "There are concerns
about whether £7m put into the e-crime unit will be
sufficient and whether it will be sufficiently resourced to
do the job in hand."
However, Home Officer Minister Alan Campbell claims that
criticism over the PCeU's funding is misguided, as the unit
will be supported by other bodies under the £29m
National Fraud Programme, which includes the National Fraud
Strategic Authority (NFSA) and the National Fraud Reporting
Centre (NFRC).
"This is not the only unit seeking to tackle online fraud.
That figure is not the end of the story," added Campbell.
The British Banking Association, and the UK Payments
Association, APACS, have also welcomed the new unit;
although neither would comment on its funding, both have
said that any initiative to tackle online fraud was a "good
idea".
So while there is consensus among all parties - police,
business, government and IT experts - that the growth of
e-crime represents a huge threat to both the individual and
the economy, the jury is still out on whether the current
approach to tackling online crime is the right one, or has
the right funding.
What is clear is that much will depend on how effective the
wider National Fraud Programme is, and how strong the links
are between forces and businesses at a local level. While
only four per cent of companies are reporting every e-crime
attack, the impact of policing on cyber crime will
inevitably be limited. So all eyes will be on the PCeU next
spring to see how it can increase the level of confidence
among businesses and IT experts in its ability to police
Internet crime.
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