Interpol & Cisco To Combat Cyber Crime At Singapore Nerve Centre

Interpol and Cisco have signed a deal that will see the two companies sharing threat information and developing future training opportunities, under the auspices of Interpol’s three-year-old cyber-crime nerve centre in Singapore.

The international police organisation established the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) in 2014 amidst increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks on banks and enterprises, organised by criminal gangs on a global scale.

At the time Interpol signed a three-year deal with Trend Micro for threat data analysis and with Kaspersky Lab for products, intelligence and ongoing support.

Cisco is now stepping in and said it would work with Interpol to develop a “coordinated and focused” approach to data sharing, with the aim of speeding up threat detection around the world.

Collaboration ‘vital’

Cisco and Interpol said they would also be looking for future training and knowledge-sharing opportunities. The organisations plan to target both pure internet crime and crimes enabled by hacking.

Interpol said it has recognised from the beginning that tackling cyber-crime requires collaboration between the public and private sectors.

“Interpol’s agreement with Cisco provides us, and law enforcement in our 192 member countries, with access to important cyber-threat information which will help us not only detect attacks but also help prevent them,” stated IGCI executive director Noboru Nakatani.

Cisco chief security and trust officer John Stewart said combating internet-borne threats requires the “visibility and comprehensive threat intelligence” that the company can provide.

Cisco says it blocks 19.7 billion threats per day through its Cisco Talos security group. It claims to have the “largest security business on the planet”, although in an interview last year the networking giant admitted people don’t immediately associate the company with the security field.

Public sector bodies are increasingly creating formal training and data-sharing arrangements with the private sector as internet-enabled crimes grow in significance.

Trend began working with the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) in 2015, under an arragement that saw the two bodies creating a cross-organisational virtual team, while Kaspersky teamed up with the City of London police in 2014.

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