E-crime strategy is not much cop

The principle of Occam’s Razor says that when all of a number of possible solutions are equal, you should always choose the simplest. Clearly nobody told the authorities in charge of tackling the growing problem of e-crime.

As our analysis this week shows, we seem to have gone from the sub-prime to the almost ridiculous.

From having practically nobody tackling e-crime after the demise of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2006, there is now such a confusing mass of organisations that it becomes hard to see how well they can truly address the issue.

Let’s not be entirely critical – there is a clear acceptance that the police have been deficient in the past, and as a result there are now several organisations that, we hope, will lead to a much larger base of the specialist resources needed to beat cyber criminals.

But from the point of view of the victims, whether business or consumer, the lack of clarity over which organisation incidents should be reported to, and who will investigate them – or even if they will be investigated at all – leaves a lot to be desired.

The latest Symantec research illustrates the scale of the problem – a 200 per cent increase in malware last year, much of it designed to steal financial details and other personal information.

The question marks over e-crime policing are such that the National Audit Office is to look into the scale of the challenge and the effectiveness of the government’s response.

But businesses also deserve particular criticism – despite calling for more resources and support to tackle the e-crime threat, not a single penny in private sector funding has materialised for the new Police Central E-crime Unit, a body that was set up specifically to re-establish the links with industry that were lost when the NHTCU disappeared.

Electronic crime is only going to grow at an ever faster pace – that much at least is simple for all to see.