Met Police push for new e-crime unit

A number of high profile incidents have led to a growing clamour of support from security industry experts and the public alike, which today was endorsed by the head of computer crime at the Metropolitan Police.

Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, who heads up the Met's computer crime team at New Scotland Yard spoke exclusively to IT PRO following news last week that IT security experts had set up an e-petition asking the government to create and fund a centralised e-crime policing unit, in the wake of the loss the records of 25 million people by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

McMurdie said about 12 months ago she prepared a paper on potential courses of action that could be taken by police around handling computer crime.

"It found that we were not making enough use of joined-up intelligence or best practice processes and opportunities for communicating at a national level about e-crime," she said. "It also said that we need better contact with ISPs [internet service providers], industry and international authorities."

She said a major caveat to tackling e-crime effectively was the fact that so much traditional, mainstream crime like burglary and robbery often nowadays has an electronic element to it, where stolen credit cards could be used to make fraudulent purchases over the internet, for example.

"The aim is to generally raise police awareness of e-crime," she added. "So that, when somebody goes into a police station to report being a victim of 'phishing' for example, the police officer they deal with knows what they are talking about and can help."

After awareness raising and liaison, McMurdie said resources were needed to centralise e-crime intelligence, so that one phishing victim can be seen in context of the thousands of others who might also have been targets in different areas of the country.

"We've made the proposal to put in place a central e-crime coordination unit, so that the forces that are doing good work, like putting resources into developing an e-crime training package, can share knowledge with others who, unbeknownst to them, may also be trying to do the same thing," she said.

McMurdie told a House of Lords select committee a few months ago that the core remit of the new e-crime unit should be five central pillars: coordination, prevention, intelligence sharing, research and development as well as inter-force and industry communication.

"The business case we've made to Home Office is for £1.3 million which would be used to fund a core team and update the central communications structure based on the Fraud Alert website, which offers advice on avoiding becoming a victim of e-crime," she said.

"We could use something like that to share intelligence across the 43 UK police forces and with the computer forensics divisions and the Serious Fraud office who are mostly targeting crimes like child abuse and major data breaches."

McMurdie will speak further in support of helping businesses avoid e-crime at The Retail Business Show on 5 and 6 February 2008 in London.

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