UK businesses demand national e-crime police unit

Almost three-quarters of businesses want a central or national body to deal with e-crime in the UK, says a new report by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

The research said that 94 per cent of businesses had suffered from spam in the last three months, with 31 per cent claiming to have been the victim of phishing. In 2004 when the last report was carried out, there was no category on phishing, which showed the changes in cybercrime during the last four years.

The study - Invisible Crime: A Business Crime Survey, looked at 3,900 businesses nationwide and asked a wide-ranging series of questions about the effects of criminal activity on companies.

"What we want to see is a national body that can take action, because obviously computer crime is not location specific and does not fit in to regional police forces," said BCC policy advisor Gareth Elliott.

Malware was impacting on nearly a quarter of businesses, with 23 per cent suffering from spyware infection and 19 per cent experiencing equipment failure or data loss following virus infection. Credit card fraud had risen from 6 per cent in the 2004 survey to 11 per cent in 2008.

"From our point of view there has been a worrying rise in e-crime," Elliott said. "This is really starting to affect a lot more businesses and especially those who are thinking of doing flexible and home working."

"This is even a problem to those businesses that want to become more green and sustainable, as well as offer employees more choice," he added.

Businesses were taking preventative measures to stop IT related problems from happening, with 77 per cent using spam filtering software, 74 per cent routinely backing up their business data, and 70 per cent storing their data online.

However security policies and action was more common with larger organisations which had 50 or more staff and a turnover of £1million. Generally this appeared to be because they had greater resources to deal with problems.

"Businesses need to use things like anti-virus and backup software as well as firewalls, and need to have strong policies," said Elliott. "You need all the basic functions within your company."

"However we think you still need the relevant police assistance. A lot of smaller businesses will need that advice to help them tackle the problem."

The Metropolitan Police head of computer crime has already endorsed plans for an e-crime unit.

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