14 DAY TRIAL // The efforts for fighting cybercrime in the UK have increased recently via a deal the National Crime Agency (NCA) made with Intel Security and Trend Micro for receiving info on digital crime activity.
The purpose of the partnership is to map cybercrime across the UK, the responsibility of the two companies being to provide data on the gangs involved in cybercrime and the infrastructure used for the malicious operations.
NCA will have better visibility in UK's cybercrime map
With this sort of information in hand, NCA knows exactly where to hit and carry out activity to dismantle the activity of the cyber groups and arrest their members.
Andy Archibald, boss of NCA’s Cyber Crime Unit, told the BBC that because security companies deal with cyber threats on a daily basis, they have a better view of the criminal landscape in the computer world, being able to identify “who and where the threat comes from.”
“Traditional law enforcement in response to crime has a victim who reports, an investigation and there's a criminal justice outcome,” Archibald said, adding that “the response to cyber crime has to be more sophisticated than that.”
Even if the individuals engaged in criminal tasks cannot be pinpointed, security experts can still point the police force to the servers and machines used for the business and at least slow down the malicious operations or stop them temporarily.
Police and security firms go hand in hand in cybercrime fight
Cooperation between security companies and law enforcement has become quite common lately, as joint efforts led to taking down significant cybercriminal activities more recent ones being Gameover Zeus and CryptoLocker, Shylock, Ramnit and Beebone.
At European level, Europol signed a memorandum of understanding agreements with multiple security companies and groups across the world, Intel, Kaspersky, CCIS and Mnemonic Intelligence being a few of them.