Downing Street petition calls for e-crime unit

A petition on the 10 Downing Street website is lobbying the government for the formation of a central police e-crime unit to deal with the growing threat of cybercrime.

The online petition was set up yesterday in reaction to the loss of 25 million child benefit claimants' records by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) last week.

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C is for CMA
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U is for USB sticks/devices
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X is for OS X
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Z is for Zero-day

The petition had more than 20 signatures, at the time of press, and calls for rapid action on funding a central police cyber crime unit to help handle the consequences of the HMRC data breach - which is the largest the UK has ever seen.

The petition says: "The consequences of, and reactions to, the loss of records by HM Revenue & Customs, make the creation of a well resourced operation to address computer assisted crime - including information and identity theft from data and call centres, not just the use of the internet to automate old crimes and invent new ones - a matter of great urgency."

But it warns any UK e-crime body needs to be on a scale akin to similar operations in the US, with additional funding and resources coming from other government departments and industry and not just from existing police budgets.

Among the signatories is Lord Harris of Haringey, who called for the UK to introduce data breach laws earlier in the year.

The UK did once have such a unique e-crime fighting body - called the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) - but this was rolled into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in April of last year.

The decision to merge the NHTCU with Soca was not a popular one. In August 2007, a House of Lords committee urged the government to do more to tackle e-crime - or risk losing public confidence in the security of the internet. And businesses also called for a police cyber crime unit this month to deal with the growing e-crime threat posed by hackers and international criminal gangs.

User group The Corporate IT Forum also talked of the need for a single reporting body for e-crime, warning that without such a dedicated unit the situation will only deteriorate.

And the police are even asking businesses to give them more information on when they fall victim to e-crime attacks, according to a high-ranking police officer.