Cyber crime

We said we would

• Enhance understanding of cyber-crime through working in partnership with other law enforcement agencies, and apply proactive intelligence and prevention strategies to address it.
• Improve our capability to tackle cyber-crime by training our frontline staff (including call centre and front desk staff) to recognise cyber-related reports of crime to enhance intelligence and evidence gathering.
• Train our officers in the skills necessary to investigate cyber-crime effectively.
• Embed tackling cyber-crime into core community policing.
• Be flexible across geographical boundaries.
• Support our residents, businesses and workers to protect themselves against the risk from cyber-crime.
• Intervene to stop our community from being drawn into low level cyber-crime, including online purchases through criminal websites.
• Develop techniques to identify and disrupt ongoing cyber-crime impacting on the City of London.
• Ensure victims affected by cyber-crime receive the support they need.

We have

• Identified cases which have involved cyber criminality and made early arrests to prevent ongoing harm.
• Conducted cyber-related investigations into corporate espionage and Bitcoin mining.
• Made arrests in connection with hacking, corporate espionage and investigated offences connected to computer misuse and bitcoin mining.
• Delivered events to partners to raise awareness of personal cyber security.
• Worked with partners and businesses in the City of London to assess vulnerabilities associated with the ICT systems.
• Delivered awareness training to schools and businesses to raise awareness of cyber bullying and encourage its reporting.
• Identified and utilised an innovative training exercise to improve business awareness and capability associated with cyber criminality.
• Tested our own vulnerability to cyber attack.

The number of cyber-crime referrals to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau has increased 8 fold over the past two years, from 15 in 2015/16 to 129 in 2017/18, indicating that awareness of this area of criminality is improving.

This is an area where we would expect to see a rise in reported incidents, due principally to the increase in awareness outlined above, and as a type of criminality, it is constantly evolving and being exploited on a global scale.