Euro cops mull crowd-sourced cybercrime data
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Crowd-sourcing cybercrime reports could help the fight against online crime, according to a senior European Union official.
Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, told a House of Lords sub-committee that plans for a European centre to fight cybercrime would include a facility for members of the public to report security attacks and online scams. Online scams often involve low level auction and credit card frauds that police are often reluctant to investigate and regularly go unreported or only notified to banks. As a result the real scope of online crime becomes a matter of guesswork.
Better reporting mechanisms – along the lines of systems already in place in the US for many years, such as the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) – could address this knowledge gap, according to Wainwright. Data would be reported to national authorities but shared with EU bodies to give a trans-European overview.
"For the first time the EU will have a comprehensive overview of reported cybercrime from within its own borders and this could even include, in the future, a component of direct engagement with the public," Wainwright told peers, the BBC reports.
Plans for an EU-wide cybercrime reporting system are still at a very early stage and not fully developed. Even if the idea secures funding, which is by no means certain, a putative European Cyber Crime Centre would not be up and running until 2014.
Wainwright outlined the plans during a hearing before the Lords Home Affairs sub-committee, which is investigating the EU's internal security strategy. ®
COMMENTS
Perhaps they should start at the beginning
And require the Police to accept reports of fraud instead of fobbing people off by telling them to report it to their bank.
That way we know how much crime there is, banks would not be able to cover up the vast extent of the fraud supported by their lazy and incompetent security processes and just occasionally somebody might get caught for it.
I'm all for a webform where you can report "I was defrauded and my bank tried to sweep it under the carpet to keep up the pretense that they can spell sickuritay"
The knowledge gap started when the Plods shed bicycles for cars
When young, our local Plod used to lazily cycle around his beat, in Buckinghamshire, carefully making mental notes of what he saw.
These days days Plod has wheels and as they whiz by, they miss so much. Criminal activity nears eyes to be detected.
Sharing information will only act as a guidepost for Plods to alert them to things that might otherwise be missed.
One international credit card scam gang was found only because a detective, on foot, noticed unusual ATM use.
Cart before horse again?
The knowledge gap is there because police agencies have no interest in expanding into internet fraud and scams.
Can't blame them really given the concentration of resources on anti-terrorism, chasing high media profile stuff (no matter how ephemeral those issues are in real crime terms), and the reluctance of the financial sector to admit that crime is even possible in their brave new world.
Only in a policing 2.0 world would user generated drivel count as "knowledge".
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