The Metropolitan Police is looking to expand its
computer crime unit into a national resource, amid admissions that
local e-crime units are no longer able to cope with a rising tide
of organised computer crime.
A report published by the Metropolitan Police last week said
that local police computer crime units are struggling to keep up
with a growing volume of attacks.
It concluded that local specialist e-crime units "can no longer
cope with all e-crime".
Businesses have complained that the merger of the
National High-Tech Crime Unit last year into a
new Serious Organised Crime Agency has left a
serious gap in policing, at a time when computer crime is reaching
epidemic proportions.
The report suggested that the Met could fill the gap by bringing
its own specialist computer crime units together into a single
operation to create a new national computer crime fighting
resource.
But the report's author, detective chief inspector Charlie
McMurdie, warned that computer crime is rising at such a rate that
it will not be possible for police to investigate every
complaint.
"The fact remains that due to the volume of offences and the
national and international nature of e-crime, sometimes involving
hundreds or thousands of victims, the police service cannot
undertake to investigate all the allegations as a matter of
course," she said.
Demands for computer forensic services, which cost the Met £4.3m
last year, are forecast to increase by 30% to 40% in 2007.
The report called for computer crime to be "mainstreamed" so
that it becomes a routine part of policing, rather than an activity
of specialists.
A national strategy under development by the Association of
Chief Police Officers (Acpo) calls for police to focus on crime
prevention and intelligence gathering. This will free up police
resources to tackle organised criminal networks and individuals
that represent a high threat.
"The objective is to reduce the opportunities for criminals to
exploit technology and to take action to 'target-harden' identified
vulnerabilities," the report said.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Sue Wilkinson, Acpo lead
on e-crime, said that the focus of the police would increasingly
move towards working with business to prevent attacks.
"Proactive prevention is really a viable way forward. If you
understand what the emerging problem is, you then work with the
bank or the industry or public awareness about what the problem is
and how to prevent it happening to them," she said.
www.acpo.police.uk
www.met.police.uk/computercrime
www.crimereduction.gov.uk/organisedcrime/organisedcrime06.htm
Related article: Changing of the e-crime guard