Industry body techUK has called on businesses and law enforcers to team up in order to raise standards of cybercrime reporting and response.
The self-styled “voice of the technology industry” submitted Freedom of Information requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales and interviewed senior police stakeholders in order to produce its recommendations.
The Partners Against Crime report reveals that, tellingly, half of those forces contacted couldn’t even supply accurate figures without manually analyzing every crime in their recording systems.
It paints a picture of law enforcement literally swamped with cybercrime.
Warwickshire police had to deal with over 2,000 online fraud reports between January 2013 and March 2014, while West Mercia police had to manage over 3,400. In Avon and Somerset, 2,345 cybercrime incidents were recorded in 2014.
TechUK has called for a new approach to improve the recording and reporting of cybercrime and the ability of police to respond.
This includes the creation of a “new lexicon” to standardize and streamline the reporting of accurate information.
Also vital is to ramp up the pressure on businesses so they feel obliged to report incidents—an area where the development of reporting apps could help.
And preventative measures like Cyber Essentials accreditation should be encouraged, the report argues.
The law enforcement response to cybercrime varies greatly from region to region, so closer co-operation is needed with the cybersecurity industry to improve standards across the board, techUK said.
This could be achieved by establishing a Managed Service Provider (MSP) model where police contract cybersecurity skills as needed. The College of Policing could be given a greater role to accredit private cybercrime training providers to ensure there are standards for national courses, the report claims.
TechUK also called for the creation of sector-specific police/industry working groups to share threat information in real time.
And it recognizes that more funds need to be ploughed into cybercrime policing.
But this is going to be difficult given the current government austerity push, which some believe will lead to the loss of over 20,000 jobs nationwide.
Nevertheless, techUK’s associate director for defense and security, James Murphy, remained upbeat.
“With further cuts expected as part of the spending review, it’s more important than ever that skills, tools and expertise are shared across forces to ensure that the police can better tackle the growing threat of cybercrime, and victims get consistent treatment, no matter where they are in the UK,” he told Infosecurity.
“To make the scale of changes needed, government and industry need to work closely together to improve consistency of reporting, recording and resolution of cybercrime across the UK.”