e-Crime Crackdown - silicon.com launches national campaign

silicon.com is today launching its e-Crime Crackdown campaign for a properly funded and dedicated national UK police unit to combat the growing threat of high-tech fraud and cyber attacks.

Britain is in the grip of the growing cyber crime menace, with e-crime now estimated to be worth $105bn worldwide - more than the illegal drugs trade.

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.

Police, businesses and politicians say Britain is ill equipped to deal with the growing threat and have been demanding a dedicated e-crime police unit since the National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) was absorbed into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in 2006.

Our e-Crime Crackdown campaign is calling for a fully-resourced national police unit to co-ordinate the investigation and reporting of hacking, denial of service and other high-tech attacks and fraud against businesses, public bodies and individuals.

The campaign has received backing from the Metropolitan Police, Shadow Home Secretary David Davis, a former White House cyber security adviser, blue chip FTSE 100 companies, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), UK payment industry body Apacs and other corporate IT security chiefs.

Our campaign is calling for more government funding to tackle e-crime. While Britain spent £4.6bn combating drugs in 2004/05 it spent only a fraction of that tackling internet and computer crime – accounting for a small part of Soca's overall £416m annual budget.

Compounding this shortfall is the fact that Soca focuses mainly on computer crime linked to major international drug and people smuggling and fraud - leaving everyday phishing, hacking, distributed denial of service and other malicious attacks to be handled by local police stations or banks.

Corporate information security officers say they have found that local police stations lack the expertise, funding and co-ordination to tackle or record the scale of these problems.

Businesses say this uncertainty means they often do not know where or whether to report such crimes, while police officers admit that the recording of e-crime varies from station to station, making it very difficult to build up a clear picture of the scale of the threat.

A further blow to cyber policing came when the UK's 43 forces lost NHTCU funding for attached technical experts, who would also report local e-crime back to the NHTCU.

The Home Office is expected to announce this month whether it will provide £1.3m in start-up funding for the Policing Central E-Crime Unit (PCEU), which would co-ordinate and collate reports of cyber crime nationwide.

Previous comprehensive spending reviews by the government have made no mention of e-crime or the PCEU unit put forward by Acpo and the Metropolitan Police Service.