Do British police get cyber security?

Police on patrol

The Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) has a vision "to contribute, alongside national and international partners, towards the provision of a safer and more secure cyber environment."

How embarrassed must the powers that be at the PCeU felt after it became clear a conference call between itself and one of its international partners, the FBI, had been hacked? Worse yet, that conference call concerned how to deal with hackers, notably the Anonymous collective which was responsible for hacking the call itself and then making a recording of it available for anyone to listen to via YouTube.

The big question here is how much did the call tell us about what police know about cyber crime? Unfortunately, it hinted at a certain ineptitude inside authorities tasked with stopping hackers like Anonymous.

Such comments don't inspire much confidence that law enforcement is really taking some of this very seriously.

You can pretty much ignore the first five minutes or so of the conversation which seems to be just that, a conversational chat. But from there on we get into the nitty gritty of talking about specific hackers and operations, which is where it gets both interesting and revealing.

When a hacker is mentioned who, amongst other things, claims to be responsible for the Steam hack, the British police officer appears to be totally unaware of what Steam actually is. No big deal you might think. After all, not everyone is a gamer and might not have an interest in one of the biggest multiplayer games distribution channels online. But when that site was widely reported as having been hacked towards the end of last year, you might think it would have registered with the law enforcement chaps tasked with catching the people responsible for such crimes.

Then there is the relatively dismissive attitude towards the hackers being discussed during the conference call. One is described as "another juvenile/wannabe" and "a smack from mum or dad" might have been behind one of the hacker's motives. Another teenage suspect is described as an attention seeking idiot. Such comments don't inspire much confidence that law enforcement is really taking some of this very seriously.

Davey Winder

Davey is a three-decade veteran technology journalist specialising in cybersecurity and privacy matters and has been a Contributing Editor at PC Pro magazine since the first issue was published in 1994. He's also a Senior Contributor at Forbes, and co-founder of the Forbes Straight Talking Cyber video project that won the ‘Most Educational Content’ category at the 2021 European Cybersecurity Blogger Awards.

Davey has also picked up many other awards over the years, including the Security Serious ‘Cyber Writer of the Year’ title in 2020. As well as being the only three-time winner of the BT Security Journalist of the Year award (2006, 2008, 2010) Davey was also named BT Technology Journalist of the Year in 1996 for a forward-looking feature in PC Pro Magazine called ‘Threats to the Internet.’ In 2011 he was honoured with the Enigma Award for a lifetime contribution to IT security journalism which, thankfully, didn’t end his ongoing contributions - or his life for that matter.

You can follow Davey on Twitter @happygeek, or email him at davey@happygeek.com.