By John Oates for The Register. This
story was reproduced with permission.
The Tories' report - Tackling Cybercrime - calls for new
offences for civil servants or government contractors who lose
confidential data, a new police squad to go after cybercrims and a
minister for cybercrime.
More radically, the Tories are also calling for a "breach law" -
forcing financial services companies to inform the Financial
Services Authority if their systems are hacked or compromised in
some way and confidential data is at risk.
The Information Commissioner's Office has been pushing for such
a change in the law. Many of the Tories' recommendations on
cybercrime closely parallel those made by the House of Lords Select
Committee on Science and Technology last August,
proposals the government rejected to the consternation of
security experts.
A Tory government would also bring forward legislation to
"create an offence of reckless handing of personal data by
government, making it an offence for a Crown Servant or government
contractor to lose personal data from their control".
The Tories also want to establish a cybercrime team within the
Crown Prosecution Service, which would work with the proposed
Police National Cybercrime Unit, and a central website for
reporting internet crimes. A single "Fraud and Cybercrime Complaint
Centre" - similar to the US Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) -
would be set up to provide central reporting of online crime.
Policies introduced in April 2006 mean the public is advised to
report incidents of credit card fraud to the banks instead of to
the police. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), created by
the merger of the National High Tech Crime Unit and other
specialist agencies in April 2006, only takes reports of cybercrime
indirectly and tackles only the largest cases.
Her Majesty's Opposition is also calling for the British
Standards Institute to back a kitemark so we could recognise emails
from large organisations in order to reduce phishing. Given
phishers' skills in copying existing email formats, this sounds
like it could backfire.
The report is available to download as a pdf from
here.
© The Register
2008
