NESTA Crime Online - University of Brighton Repository

Responses are required at all the levels identified above. As individuals we need to
retrain ourselves to make our personal IT systems more secure, although there is little
incentive if banks make good cybercrime losses in such an efficient way, creating
minimal inconvenience for the customer.
The private sector responses should be reviewed and analysed in search of best practice.
The security forces should work together in areas currently defined by insularity. The
international system must pool resources and information. Cybercriminals operating in
weak states require a major effort as effective responses cannot be expected to occur
without help from multilateral agencies and the more capable law enforcement bodies.
Research initiatives should also be genuinely multidisciplinary, to include, for example,
criminology, development studies, economics (finance, micro-, macro-), IT studies,
innovation studies and, even, strategic studies.
Additional resources will be increasingly difficult to secure given the state of the public
finances; yet levels of funding to address cybercrime in the UK and elsewhere are
already derisory. However, this is not a lost cause. The relatively cash rich development
sector should be brought in as a major stakeholder, not just for resources but also for
expertise. When the banking system recovers, it should be asked to provide more
resources, which should presumably be easier now that so many are all but nationalised.
The challenges are to seek a reorientation of existing resources and capacity and to
begin with initiatives that are less resource intensive – transparency is mainly a result of
attitude and good practice. As such, the UK government has a leading and major role to
play, which should be cross departmental in scope to include the Home Office, FCO, DfID
and even the MoD – combating cybercrime in all its forms is a compelling argument to
revisit the need for ‘joined-up-government’. The Cabinet Office should take the lead in
co-ordinating strategy and policy across government.
There are many worrying estimates over just how extensively cybercrime has already
accessed financial information and possibly not all are exaggerations. If even a small
percentage of the estimates turn out to be correct, there are more serious problems on
the horizon. At present, a ‘band-aid’ response has prevailed but nobody has really taken
on the task of working through what might be the implications if the patient becomes
too ill for band-aids to work. Against a backdrop of recent financial meltdown, the effects
of which will weaken the overall system for many years to come, lower levels of
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