back to article Just a third of Brit cops are equipped to fight crime that is 'cyber'

Just one in three police forces in the UK are able to tackle cybercrime such as DDoS, malware attacks and online fraud, a Home Affairs Committee heard today. Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, told MPs that research conducted last year revealed a lack of skills across the country's 43 police forces …

  1. Whitter
    Flame

    Cheap, cheap, cheap.

    <rant>

    The lasting legacy of the UK over the last 30 years is "do it on the cheap".

    Cheap buildings; cheap education; cheap infrastructure; cheap public services.

    Not that the costs are necessarily low, but 'specified' to be cheap and of cheap quality, though typically costing a bomb thanks to top-notch management.

    So when the Police need to pay for new recruits who have marketable skills - what will the government do? Something useless on the cheap as always.

    Move along; nothing to see here.

    </rant>

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: Cheap, cheap, cheap.

        "the local police station is to close to save money"

        It's not really to save money. What's been happening - and Sara Thornton is as much to blame as anyone else - is that Police buildings have been sold off and the one-off income used to cover the gaps in operational funding.

        This is clearly an unsustainable funding model.

        1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

          Re: Cheap, cheap, cheap.

          Unfortunately there is a lot of sustainability in this funding model....

          Police stations are often in prime locations and therefore being sold off for good amounts of money. Police stations are often then merged and new buildings built using PFI arrangements. The same PFI arrangements that worked out so well for the NHS that trusts are now saddled with 25-50 years of crippling debt repayments and expensive servicing costs way beyond what it would have cost to just pay for the thing in the first place.

          ... unfortunately the funding sustainability element is not to the benefit of the public.

  2. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Yes, we're equipped, they quipped!

    > Just one in three police forces in the UK are able to tackle cybercrime such as DDoS, malware attacks and online fraud

    See, now my understanding of a statement like that is that if I have bought something online that didn't turn up, or if something I downloaded turned out to be nasty-ware, then I would be able to dial 999 and report it as a crime. Soon after, a helmeted type would turn up, take statements, search for (and find!) evidence of the dastardly deed, then a short time later inform me that the "perp" had been detained and coughed to the offence.

    That is what tackling crime entails: detection, apprehension, judgement and (if guilty) punishment. I look forward to the day when I can even get as far as convincing the cops to simply increment the number of cyber-crimes reported when such an event happens.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Yes, we're equipped, they quipped!

      If you are robbed physically and go to the station you are told to stop wasting their time and go to the website and fill in the form to get a crime number for the insurance.

      With a 2x increase in the budget then 100% of officers will be able to tell you to do the same for cyber-crime

      1. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: Yes, we're equipped, they quipped!

        If you were robbed then you should get a response, even these days, if there is any hope of a successful investigation. Robbery is too serious to get ignored. But you may be confusing robbery and theft.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Yes, we're equipped, they quipped!

          If you were robbed then you should get a response, even these days, if there is any hope of a successful investigation. Robbery is too serious to get ignored.

          Given that the Met have lost control of the streets in London, it would seem that the response to robbery and gang/theft related murder is belated and inadequate. There have been 66 murders in the first six months of this year, and were 16,000 moped equipped robberies in 2017 (not to mention 70,000 burglaries). The inability of the police to address cyber crime would seem to be irrelevant with those sort of statistics.

          Whilst some will point to the falling number of police officers, it seems to me that the police seem ineffective even with the resources they do have, and the criminal justice system provides neither deterrent nor remedy.

          1. Adam 52 Silver badge

            Re: Yes, we're equipped, they quipped!

            Yes. Police feel hamstrung by the courts; if they chase anyone on a motorbike and that person injures themselves or anyone else then the Police are liable. That's led to many forces prohibiting any pursuit involving a motorbike (and it's almost impossible to get a car pursuit authorised too).

            Even if someone is caught the court hands out a small fine, which doesn't get paid. Most of the moped thefts aren't robbery. Where there genuinely is a robbery and the criminal is caught and charged they'll find themselves before a proper judge and then we do get proper sentencing. But that's a very rare event.

      2. Pete 2 Silver badge

        Re: Yes, we're equipped, they quipped!

        > With a 2x increase in the budget then 100% of officers will be able to tell you to do the same for cyber-crime

        Which is about as useful as the joker who was asked a very difficult question, thought for a second and replied "I'm glad to say, I can give you an immediate answer!"

        When pressed to actually give the answer, he/she/it responded "My answer is that I don't know"

        If "equipped" to deal with a type of crime means nothing more than having a prepared response to reports of it - little more than sod off, we're too busy then I suppose we should consider the police to be "equipped" to handle anything from a lost cat to a nuclear war.

        Great!

  3. AMBxx Silver badge

    Is this the right level to work at?

    There's a central, national fraud crime thingy (I have a firm grasp of how it works!). What's the point on having cybercrime at an individual police force level?

    Needs to be a central service. How that's funded across forces is another problem

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is this the right level to work at?

      My thoughts exactly.

      The internet is a place, it's not a physical place. Having every force tool up for cyber crime is pointless, how do you know what crime is on your patch? You could investigate one crime and another force is looking into the same one wasting money and resources. The individual forces should come into play when its time to arrest someone, they then pass them onto the cyber crime specialist detectives. Absolutely clueless this (and all) government.

      Edit: Thinking about this a little more by allocating it out to the separate forces they are in effect suggesting that people that commit crime on the internet do it local to where they live only. It's Stupid I tells ya.

    2. Adam 52 Silver badge

      Re: Is this the right level to work at?

      There are two issues:

      Online fraud. Should be dealt with by Act on Fraud centrally.

      Conventional crime with a cyber element (playground bullying using WhatsApp, rape with a SMS message history etc.) These are investigated locally.

      1. Teiwaz

        Re: Is this the right level to work at?

        playground bullying?

        It's a shame and a bad sign if that this is something left for the Police to 'deal with'.

        This sort of trend won't end well.

        1. Adam 52 Silver badge

          Re: Is this the right level to work at?

          "playground bullying?"

          It's all about passing the blame around. Teachers don't want to be accused of a cover up. Parents want someone to take responsibility for parenting from them.

          So it all comes down to a PC who, technically, should be arresting the ten year old to decide between the devil (arrest the child and seize their phone for forensic analysis and get lambasted for over-reacting and traumatising children) and the deep blue sea (do nothing, take the black mark on the clean up statistics all the while knowing that if anything happens and it escalates then they're going to prison for misconduct in a public office).

  4. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    Who cares how are they are equipped. Do they know how to use it?

    The way the system is setup if you report an attempted fraud of any type you get a "help to victims leaflet". That is all. No investigation, no consequences. Nothing.

    This is speaking out of experience by the way. Half a year ago I managed to collect all the details on a fraud attempt including some which should have at least pointed to a local rep/mule.

    I tried their online system to report it. First of all, it is an example of everything that is wrong with law enforcement in the UK today. It takes ONE HOUR to fill all of the details of a single incident and the system has multiple assumptions that you are already defrauded and the horse has bolted. It is not surprising that there is no policemen to do any street beat - they are all filling forms like that trying to extract information from some distraught granny whose savings have gone to Prince Mbongo Mbongo.

    To add insult to injury - the idea that the fraud is in progress and there is still a possibility to catch the perp is utterly foreign. It is 100% "after the fact" policing. Incident in progress? We never heard about that.

    Once you have suffered from one hour of boredom filling the forms it goes into a month long queue (by which time the perp and the money should be in NK, Nigeria or China). Then you get a "we would like to help victims of frad" and "how to keep safe online" leaflets as a special prize. You can now frame them and ignore any ideas about reporting anything the next time.

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: Who cares how are they are equipped. Do they know how to use it?

      Been there, done that, got bored filling in the form.

      Yes we need a central team. But we need a central team that is actually equipped and staffed to take immediate action for 'crime in progress'.

      I tried to report some live phishing attacks that seemed to be using live bank accounts (possibly). Hopeless. Used 'live chat' to communicate with some call-centre drone who basically said all they do is record things which may or may not be looked at by real police-persons, sometime. I ended up reporting the phishing domains to the registrar myself who killed them.

      Remind me - which party of government was keen to support the police, and which Home Secretary cut 20,000 plods?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Crime is the enemy

    From the ONS Crime in England and Wales survey 2017:

    "The latest CSEW estimate is 5.8 million incidents of crime in the year ending June 2017, a 9% reduction compared with the previous year. However, these headline estimates do not yet include fraud and computer misuse offences as these have not been included in the survey for the full two years needed to make annual comparisons. Including fraud and computer misuse, there were an estimated 10.8 million incidents of crime in the year ending June 2017."

    Fraud and Computer misuse are almost FIFTY PERCENT of reported crime.

    I'd also guess that the recent "scandal" about lack of police action against reported crime is almost certainly because the cyber crime is not only something that Crapshire County Police can't deal with but also something that no national police force can because its source is somewhere on the internet... probably somewhere where extradition isn't going to happen.

    If you have ever actively worked a serious cyber attack, even working with proper LEO's, you will know that the chances of an arrest and prosecution are virtually ZERO. Some of the ones I have worked are very serious crimes too - not Facebook posts that hurt people's feelings.

    Sending PC Plod on an IT course or giving him some SANS training isn't going to fix this. Utter waste of time and money.

  6. Teiwaz

    No capability?

    One place I lived, my car was broken into repeatedly.

    They seemed to have no capability to investigate that either. I was lucky if I got a phonecall at work telling me my car was left with it's door wide open from mid morning onward.

    Seems 'tech investment' money is better spent on getting facial recognition right at certain festivals and holding onto illegally retained information.

  7. GnuTzu
    Go

    Privitization

    Maybe this is a business opportunity to sell security services to the government, and conservatives should be jumping on it. And, I'm wondering how much business there is out there to work for a private detective agency.

  8. FlamingDeath Silver badge

    I can just imagine the retarded thought process being deployed here

    "Thornton also welcomed plans by Home Secretary Sajid Javid for MI5 to declassify and share information on UK citizens suspected of having terrorist sympathies."

    What constitutes a terrorist sympathiser?

    If I am critical of Anti-Terrorism™

    Does that make me a terrorist sympathiser?

    What if I suggest most terrorist attacks are False Flags™ and highly questionable

    Does that make me a terrorist sympathiser?

    I somehow suspect I am on that list, the result of a swivel eyed loon being allowed to be in charge of a pen, in the department of insecurity and unintelligence at Mi5

  9. FlamingDeath Silver badge

    "However, handling the volume and complexity of data remains a key challenge for forces, said Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner. She told MPs she was 'deeply concerned about the exponential rise in digital data and the impact that is having'"

    Doublespeak translator:

    "She told MPs she was "deeply concerned about the exponential rise in historical evidence lingering about on the interwebs and the impact that is having on her ability to sweep it all under the carpet"

  10. handleoclast
    Coat

    Nice choice of picture

    Two cops, about to pop into the TARDIS so they can have sex with the Cybermen and breed cybercops.

    Which is probably exactly how the Home Office intends to do it.

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