UK's 'tidal wave' of cybercrime addressed

The UK is experiencing a massively under-reported ‘tidal wave’ of cybercrime costing billions of pounds a year. Legalbrief reports that an alarming new trend has seen a growing number of children and teenagers using the Internet to carry out financial scams. Data released under Freedom of Information rules shows that up to 85% of reported online crimes are going unsolved and that the 39 339 offences reported to 30 out of the 45 police forces in the UK in the past 12 months represent only a fraction of the true number of offences being committed. An investigation by i news reveals that police forces across the UK on average are dedicating just 1% of their budgets to cybercrime. The findings follow warnings made last month by Britain’s public spending watchdog that online fraud has been ‘overlooked by government, law enforcement and industry’. Meg Hillier, the chairperson of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, said ‘we rank below Brazil, China and South Africa when it comes to keeping our computers and phones secure’. She called for the authorities to ‘raise our game when it comes to cyber security’. ‘From police forces investing in tackling online crime to investing in young people to ensure we have the skills we currently lack, the Government needs to do more and faster. The threat of cybercrime is growing,’ she added.

Technology has long been the domain of the young, but few are aware of the extent to which its use to commit crime is also dominated by minors and even extends to suspected offences carried out by primary school children. The National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed last month that the average age of suspects that it has investigated for cybercrime offences such as computer hacking and online fraud is just 17. But police have reportedly told i news and Johnston Press Investigations that children as young as 12 have been arrested after being drawn into serious offences through online gaming forums. ‘The skill barrier to entry in cyber criminality is lower than it has ever been. Many illegal products are advertised openly on low level hacking or gaming forums. These circumstances have created an environment in which more young people are becoming involved in cyber crime.’ The report notes that most offenders are drawn into the world of ransomware and denial of service attacks, designed to take websites offline by flooding them with data, by interacting with recruiters and other hackers they meet on Internet forums for gamers.

Meanwhile, a 29-year-old British man has confessed to carrying out a cyber-attack on Deutsche Telekom’s routers last year, claiming he had acted on behalf of a Liberian telecommunications company but that his mission had got out of hand. Speaking via a translator at a court in Cologne, Germany, the man, who was arrested under a European arrest warrant at Luton airport in February, described it as the ‘biggest mistake of my life’. The Guardian reports that the November attack affected about 900 000 routers and briefly stopped their owners getting online, affecting about 1.25m Deutsche Telekom customers. The Bonn-based company estimated the cost of the attack to have been more than £1.79m.