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Cyber crime: The global battle
e-Crime Crackdown - does the UK measure up?

By Nick Heath

Published: Thursday 05 June 2008

UK

Is there a central body to co-ordinate national reporting and investigations of cyber crime?
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has an e-crime unit that provides cyber crime intelligence and expertise for major operations undertaken by the agency.

Everyday cyber crime must be reported to local police stations where high-tech expertise can vary widely. There is no central point of contact to report e-crime or mechanism to collate national reports.

The global battle against e-crime

1. USA

2. India

3. Australia

4. UK

Cyber policing infrastructure:
Soca is one of two national bodies tasked with tackling cyber crime but e-crime is not one of the key priority areas identified for Soca by the government.

Soca focuses mainly on computer crime linked to major international drug and people smuggling and, to a lesser extent, fraud - leaving everyday phishing, hacking, distributed denial of service and other malicious attacks to be handled by local police stations or banks.

The agency provides limited support for local police investigations into e-crime.

A separate Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), with its own team of dedicated staff supports investigations into child pornography.

A National Fraud Reporting Centre to collate reports of all types of fraud across England and Wales is expected to be launched next year, which would collate reports of cyber crime-related fraud and share information between government, law enforcement and other bodies.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Metropolitan Police Service are waiting to see if the Home Office will grant £1.3m in start-up costs for their proposed Policing Central E-crime Unit, which would co-ordinate cyber crime investigations by local forces nationwide.

How long has the UK had a cyber crime police unit?
The multi-agency National High-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) was launched to tackle the growing cyber crime threat in the UK in 2001. It was absorbed into Soca in 2006.

Resources/expertise
Soca has about 58 staff in the UK e-crime unit.

Staff working for Soca have a host of expertise ranging from forensic hard disc examination to the ability to intercept and track data over networks.

It has the capacity to contract in staff with specialist forensic skills if needed.

Soca spends about £400m each year on running costs and £50m on capital costs every year. Figures are not broken down for e-crime but the agency has allocated five per cent of its resources to combat fraud this year, most of which is cyber crime-related.

During the time of the NHTCU there used to be a computer specialist officer attached to each of the 43 regional forces, who would provide expertise and a link with the national body. Most of the posts have now folded.

In September Soca will begin using an information portal to share intelligence and expertise on e-crime with law enforcers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US on top of its regular meetings with its international counterparts and secondment of its officers to learn from agencies across the world.

Type of cyber crime dealt with
The majority of the Soca e-crime unit's time is spent on investigations into online credit and personal information theft and their sale on the internet but it also deals with cases of extortion and distributed denial of service attacks.

The e-crime unit's other function is to provide support into investigations into Soca's priority areas.

Soca's e-crime unit estimates that by devolving some of the NHTCU former child protection responsibilities to CEOP it has freed up about a third of its resources to be focused on other computer-related crime.

Partnership with business
Soca sends out alerts to UK business warning of major phishing scams and virus outbreaks and raises the alarm about compromised bank accounts.

Soca is trying to rebuild the close links the NHTCU had with business through its information sharing forum for financial services and its planned forum for online retailers.

Recently the UK's payment association Apacs launched the Payment Industry and Police Joint Intelligence Unit to collate reports of fraud within the banking industry and spread it among police forces.