Government urged to set up specialist cyber crime centre

The UK public faces real difficulties when it comes to reporting cyber crimes a committee investigating internet safety has heard.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee was told that the Government should decide to either try these crimes alongside other offences such as pick pocketing or set up a special centre.

The Committee, which is investigating personal internet security, heard from experts at Microsoft and the open source community how local police forces lack the necessary skills and expertise in dealing with these crimes.

Combined with confusion felt by the general public over how and who to report these crimes to contributed to the growing problem of online offences.

"If you walk up to the desk sergeant at a typical police station…he does not understand the problems (and why he should) and there is nowhere else to go.

"We need something which deals with electronic crime and computers, either an understanding in police stations or we need a central contact point", said Alan Cox, who spoke to the Committee on behalf of the open source community.

Jerry Fishenden, National Technology Officer for Microsoft UK pointed out that a single point of reporting, the Internet Crime Complaints Centre, established by the FBI back in the late 1990s had been very successful; a similar scheme in the UK could therefore help authorities get to grip with the situation.

"We believe it is necessary to have as easy a reporting mechanism as possible… If I walked in to a police station tomorrow to report an on-line phishing attack, would it be treated in the same way as an attempted pick-pocketing? Is that a model we want to move to or do we want to have cyber-crime handled at the centre?”," he said.

Mr Fishenden also commented that he would like to see more done to tackle the threat to Internet users’ security posed by spam but denied that Microsoft was more concerned with establishing market dominance by rushing out operating systems rather than ensuring their security.

"I guess I would take almost the opposite view, we have been waiting five years for Windows Vista. I certainly do not think it is true that we have been rushing out new operating systems without due account of security," he said.