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New study will tackle cybercrime

One of the largest international consultations into cybercrime has been launched to help governments, law enforcement and businesses crack down on cybercriminals.

The International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA) and its strategic law enforcement partner Europol will run the study, named Project 2020, which will analyse current trends in cybercrime and how they may evolve over the next eight years and beyond.

“Cybercrime evolves as quickly as technology, and technology develops so quickly that the unthinkable becomes main stream before we can imagine. We have the groups around the table who can make sure this will no longer be the case,” said Europol’s Dr. Baines, who will be the project director.

Project 2020 has been implemented as an international effort to provide insight into how cybercrime will develop.  The project aims to deliver information and recommendations that raise awareness amongst governments, businesses and citizens to help them prepare their defences against future threats.

“Cybercrime is notoriously difficult to tackle given the international structure and capabilities of some of the criminal networks we see in operation. It used to be inherently difficult to combine international efforts to fight cybercrime; this project will for the first time, bring together experts globally,” said John Lyons, chief executive of the ICSPA.

The ICSPA said it believes that cybercrime has industrialised in the past two years and that criminals can now draw on an entire supporting infrastructure of criminal service providers, from web hosting to generating credit card verification data.

“During the past 24 months, critical infrastructure in countries around the world has been under daily cyber attack from both organised criminal networks and state-sponsored entities,” added Lyons.

Europol said it predicts rapid evolution in these threat scenarios.

“With two-thirds of the world yet to join the internet, we can expect to see new criminals, new victims and new kinds of threats,” said Dr Victoria Baines, strategic advisor on cybercrime at Europol.

Project 2020 will hope to combine the expertise of leading law enforcement agencies with that of the ICSPA’s member companies, organisations and professional communities, the ICSPA said.  Among those contributing to the study are the City of London Police and the European Network and Information Security Agency.

“Cybercrime is becoming pervasive in society, threatening the technological, financial and social fabric of developed and developing countries. Confronting and combating it now and in the future presents one of the most difficult and important challenges of our time and can only succeed by the international community working as one,” said Steve Head, head of economic crime at the City of London Police.

Two global professional communities also participating are the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2 and the International Association of Public Prosecutors.

“We applaud this opportunity to not only facilitate consultation but also improve policy development around the world.  We will be encouraging contributions from the breadth of our membership who come from government and private business, and will be able to provide insight from the coalface of current practice in the field,” said Hord Tipton, the executive director of (ISC)2.

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