Antivirus Software Concealed Thousands Of Cybercrime Reports

The UK’s national strategy for tackling cybercrime is well established but, outside national agencies, its relevance is limited. Within police forces, the threat from cyber-dependent crime is often not fully understood and is rarely seen as a priority. Knowledge about good practice isn’t shared in a structured way, and as a result there is quite a lot of variation in the local responses to a national threat. 

Recently it was found that thousands of reports of cybercrime were quarantined on a police database instead of being investigated because software designed to protect the computer system labelled them a security risk.

The backlog at one point stretched to about 9,000 reports of cybercrime and fraud, some of them dating back to October last year. The reports had been made to Action Fraud and handed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), run by the City of London police.

Just one of Britain's 43 police forces treats online crime as a priority, while the Action Fraud organisation managed to withhold 9,000 so-called cyber-crime reports from police forces, thanks to badly configured antivirus on its reporting portal, according to a government watchdog. 

Software intended to screen reports about online threats sent to Action Fraud by members of the public was incorrectly triggered when members of the public, tried to report cyber threats against them.

A police database called Know Fraud, operated by the NFIB, was incorrectly holding some detailed reports in quarantine after an "updating" of the system in October 2018. "In some cases the automated system mistakenly identified reports as containing malicious coding," reported the national police inspection agency, HMICFRS

Around 9,000 reports were found to be languishing in quarantine. City of London Police, owners and operators of the NFIB, began work on the backlog, which has now been significantly  reduced.

Meanwhile, the report's authors tried to strike a positive note in their summary and foreword, the detail gave the game away. More than a quarter of police forces "told us that cyber-dependent crime, and cybercrime more generally, were not a specific strategic priority," said HMICFRS.

Businesses reporting cybercrimes against them "were less likely to be considered vulnerable" by police workers, even though the NFIB stated a few months ago that businesses were at a "high risk of becoming victims" of cybercrime, prompting police to treat them "differently from other victims" and even delaying their response, particularly for SMEs.

Although all UK police forces do now have cybercrime units, it appears from the HMICFRS report that there is something of an internal police power struggle over which police units should receive, classify and allocate online crime reports for investigation, as well as deciding who gets to investigate. 

While Action Fraud is designated as the he preferred initial point of contact, it is increasingly seen by the general public as an ineffectual as it seems to do little to tackle cybercrime. HMICFRS said it had "found several examples of forces not committing to the regionally managed, locally delivered model agreed by chief constables". 

HMICFS Report:      National Crime Agency:     The Register:         Guardian: 

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