Businesses call for police cyber crime unit

UK businesses are calling for a dedicated national police unit to deal with the growing computer crime threat posed by hackers and international gangs of criminals.

Organisations must currently report any attacks on their network or data to local police computer crime units and there is concern at the lack of co-ordination since the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit was essentially disbanded in 2006 and rolled into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

There is now no central body to collect and monitor national cyber crime statistics and the Metropolitan Police Service admitted earlier this year that local police computer crime units are being overwhelmed by the growing scale of this type of crime.

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Members of silicon.com's CIO Jury panel of IT users have now joined calls for a centralised police computer crime body.

Simon Honey, head of business protection at investment bank Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International, said: "The Home Office has not invested enough into training police officers in the area of cyber crime as they have the impression that big businesses should be able to look after themselves."

He added: "The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit performed a very good service which is now lost."

Because Soca only deals with major computer crime incidents, the danger is that smaller-scale ones will fall through the net, according to David Supple, director of IT and creative services at Ecotec.

He said: "The police will probably end up treating minor e-crimes in the same manner as real life minor crime - their resources simply won't stretch that far and only the big headline crimes will be followed through to prosecution."

But Nicholas Bellenberg, IT director at publisher Hachette Filipacchi UK, said there are already plenty of private sector IT security and computer crime investigation companies out there for businesses to turn to.

He said: "I think there are credible private sector security companies who would be a first port of call to investigate if this was a concern. As with other instances of commercial crime, how they are then dealt with depends on the impact to the organisation. Much more occurs than is made public by pursuing prosecution through the courts."

The Metropolitan Police Service is also pushing for a national computer crime unit that would act as a central co-ordinator for police forces across the country.