Greater efforts are being taken to combat cybercrime on an international level in areas of prevention, information exchange, investigation and capacity building.

Greater efforts are being taken to combat cybercrime on an international level in areas of prevention, information exchange, investigation and capacity building.

Experts at a recent Interpol-Europol cybercrime conference have agreed a raft of measures in which all stakeholders can jointly cooperate.

“Delegates supported a number of joint activities to be undertaken by Interpol and Europol in coordination with involved partners and countries including publication of joint reports, disseminating early warning messages, conducting assessments of inter-regional cyber-attacks, carrying out operations to take down Botnets and standardisation of training, tools and processes,” a press statement by Interpol said.

It said fast and effective information sharing with partners from different sectors through structures such as the Joint Cybercrime Action Task Force or the Cyber Fusion Centre at the Interpol Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) was also highlighted as an area to be further developed.

The need to coordinate enforcement activities, enhance law enforcement capacity and identify the legal tools required for successful prosecutions also topped the agenda, as did money laundering through online gambling, virtual currencies and digital forensics analysis.

IGCI executive director Noboru Nakatani said, “Cybercrime remains one of the most pervasive threats to global security, and if we are to be effective in our efforts to combat this threat, we must build capacity at the national, regional and international levels.

“It is through the creation of dedicated law enforcement facilities such as the IGCI, in coordination with our partners around the world, that we will close the net on cybercriminals,” he added.

Troels Oerting, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre said the conference sent a number of signals to global law enforcement, private parties and organised crime.

“This conference is a strong example of the determination of the two main international actors joining forces to prevent and prosecute cybercrime, increase capacity and enhance intelligence in order to serve our respective colleagues and citizens on the frontline.

“At the same time, we send a forceful message to the cybercriminal networks that global cybercrime units all over the world have decided to find ways to overcome obstacles and exploit all possibilities to identify and track them down. Our common goal is to make life easier for law enforcement, industry and citizens, and much more difficult and risky for criminals,” said Oerting.

ICC International Maritime Bureau (IMB) in August joined industry calls for parties in the maritime sector to be on guard against cyber-attacks.

IMB said recent events have shown that systems managing the movement of goods need to be strengthened against the threat of such attacks.

One high profile example of this was the hacking of the Port of Antwerp’s system, but IMB also has cases on file where manipulation of individual company computer systems has led to charter freight and payments to suppliers being diverted into a fraudster’s bank account undetected.

IMB notes that most of these cases are characterised by the time lapse between the system being compromised and the subsequent crime taking place.

This suggests that the hackers, who reportedly work for organised crime gangs, are willing to wait for the best opportunity to maximise their theft and increase the chances it will pass undetected, so that it may be repeated.

By employing this tactic, they are also able to learn more about how individual systems work and use this knowledge in future attacks on similar systems.

Recent reports suggest nearly 80% of cybercrime incidents originate from some form of organised criminal activity, and put the annual cost of cybercrime at between $375 and $575 billion.

*Further analysis on cybercrime is available in the October edition of Commercial Crime International, produced by ICC Commercial Crime Services for members.