Kaspersky Lab Partners London Police To Tackle Cyber Crime

The fight against cybercrime continues with the news that a London police force is getting outside help to become a bit more security savvy.

The City of London police is teaming up with Russian cybersecurity specialist Kaspersky Lab, in an effort to help educate both the police, and businesses around the UK, on dealing with the growing menace of cybercrime.

Cybercrime Education

Kaspersky Lab cites data from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, which reports that cybercrime is behind the majority of fraud offences carried out nowadays. Indeed, seven out of ten scams are now said to be Internet-related.

For example, in April this year, City of London Police warned about scam emails purporting to be from Neil Trotter, the winner of £107.9m on the Euromillions lottery. The email offers “One Million Great Britain Pounds” from Trotter’s prize fund in an apparent show of generosity, but in reality the message is designed to pilfer financial data and steal identities of users.

Yet understanding and detecting the cybercrime threat remains a problematic area for both the police and businesses, and now in the first of its kind deal with UK law enforcement, Kaspersky Lab is to train police officers to help tackle this issue.

The lofty aim of the scheme is to teach police officers the required skills and knowledge to help them identify and resolve these crimes. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau for instance has already completed this training earlier in the year.

The week-long “hands-on” train course will include network traffic inspection, how to analyse hard-drive images, and how to decompile malicious software using specialised training tools and methodology developed by Kaspersky Lab.

Following that, the scheme will be extended to large enterprises, to help IT departments to protect their businesses. That training also apparently aims to educate businesses on the need for better fraud reporting, even though institutions such as banks, are notoriously reluctant to publicly reveal when their systems and networks have been compromised by outside forces.

Kaspersky Lab however has a lot of experience here. In February this year, it launched a suite of tools to ensure the safety of online payment transactions on computers and mobile devices. The server-side Kaspersky Fraud Prevention platform is aimed at banks, financial organisations and companies in the e-commerce sector.

Keeping Pace

“As the complexity of cybercrime constantly increases, it’s imperative that the service’s knowledge of such threats increases at the same pace,” said David Clark, Det Chief Supt Economic Crime Directorate of the City of London Police.

“With over 21,000 computer misuse crimes in the UK in the first quarter of 20141, it’s clear that people and businesses are at risk and need protecting,” said Clark. “The UK police service needs to be ready to identify these crimes and have the knowledge to tackle them head on. This partnership with Kaspersky Lab further underlines our role as the national policing lead for economic crime and will enhance our capability for combating fraud and cybercrime nationwide.”

Last year, Freedom of Information (FOI) requests sent out by TechWeekEurope to every police force in the UK revealed stark differences in records of cyber crime across the UK.

The Metropolitan Police, unsurprisingly, encountered the most cybercrime. It saw a rise in Computer Misuse Act offences from 11,181 in 2010 to 12,817 in 2012 (up to November). Yet only 997 individuals were charged, less than in either 2010, when 1291 people were charged, or 2011, when the number was 1262.

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