Police backs calls for e-crime unit

e-Crime Crackdown: Groundswell of support for silicon.com campaign

Leading police officers, global cyber security chiefs and FTSE 100 companies are backing a new campaign by silicon.com for the creation of a dedicated UK national cyber crime police unit.

Some of the biggest names in law enforcement, business and the IT industry have thrown their weight behind our e-Crime Crackdown campaign.

silicon.com's e-Crime Crackdown campaign is calling for a national UK cyber crime police unit.
The unit would provide leadership and expertise to co-ordinate investigations nationwide and collate reports from police forces across the country, as well as offering a central point of contact for reporting e-crime.
We want to hear your views about this campaign and your experiences of being a victim of cyber crime. Were you happy with the way your case was handled? Make your voice heard by leaving a Reader Comment below or emailing us in confidence at editorial@silicon.com.

The campaign has received backing from the Metropolitan Police, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), politicians, businesses, UK payment industry body Apacs and other corporate IT security heads.

Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, who has just stepped aside as head of the Metropolitan Police's e-crime unit, has already put proposals for a Policing Central E-Crime Unit (PCEU) to the Home Office.

McMurdie told silicon.com in an exclusive interview that a centralised policing unit would address weaknesses in the current national policing approach to cyber crime.

She said: "Until we have a hub in place to work with industry or academics we cannot move forward. For example in the case of a phishing attack it may be there are a couple of hundred victims across the UK but at the moment it is recorded as a number of single incidents at local stations.

"There is also the chance that each attack would be recorded differently and that each station will only have a handful of officers able to deal with these reports. There has been a substantial rise in the amount of online crime being reported and these are more sophisticated attacks carried out by more organised criminal networks."

Detective Chief Inspector Simon Taylor, Acpo officer for business crime, said the UK's police forces are agreed on the need for a central unit to co-ordinate cyber crime investigations and reporting.

He said: "There is a question mark over where people and businesses are best to go if they have been the victim of e-crime. We know there is a problem because people are telling us but where UK policing could tell you how many armed robberies of rapes there have been we cannot tell you as accurately how many e-crimes there have been."

Gareth Griffiths, head of UK risk management for online payment service PayPal said a dedicated unit would help his company tackle the increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks that cost it millions every year.

He said: "The way enforcement is handled is absolutely ridiculous. The resources and the priority given to e-crime are just totally wrong. There is no one place where you can go where you know these crimes will be aggregated to a larger organisation. We need a national online fraud reporting centre and we need it now."

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis launched a stinging attack on the government's track record for tackling e-crime, saying it had exposed every person and business in the UK to online criminals.

He said: "The national approach to the growing threat lacks co-ordination, focus or urgency. It reinforces in the mind of the criminal that this country is a soft touch and makes us a more acceptable target. It is absurd that the government removed the NHTCU [National High Tech Crime Unit] without putting anything in place to fill the gap."

Paul Simmonds, global head of security for ICI and founding member of blue chip IT user group the Corporate IT Forum (Tif), which counts many FTSE 100 companies among its members, said UK law enforcement is falling further and further behind the cyber criminals.

He said: "We desperately need 'son of NHTCU'. The demise of the NHTCU means that UK Plcs today have nowhere to go to report everyday e-crime. So the reality is that we keep it to ourselves, it does not get reported in the statistics and nobody does anything about it.

"E-crime has now surpassed the global drugs trade in terms of damage and cost but where is our priority? UK police spending on drugs versus e-crime is about 100-1. It means we need to spend 10 to 20 times what we are spending today in countering the e-crime menace."

Geoff Donson served as a Detective Sergeant for six years in the NHTCU and now is group security manager for European data centre company TelecityGroup.

He said: "The NHTCU had a national remit to deal with IT related crimes, it was a hub that could take cyber crime reports from the 43 forces and ensure that somebody with the requisite skills was able to deal with it."

UK payment industry body Apacs also says there is a need for a dedicated cyber crime unit in the UK.

An Apacs spokesman said: "It boils down to the need for a dedicated unit. The NHTCU was a focused unit while in Soca (Serious and Organised Crime Agency) it has become part of a wider remit. It is also a resource issue and police across the country do not have the resources to deal with this."