UK To Combat Cyber Criminals In National Security Strategy, Strategic Defense And Security Review

Posted by: Benjamin Vitáris

November 26, 2015

The United Kingdom’s government has published its National Security Strategy, Strategic Defense And Security Review for 2015 this month. The government mentioned points including the defense against terrorism, extremism, organized crime, protecting the UK overseas, crisis response and many other important factors for the country. However, which is more important for the dark web users, it is their policy on defending against cyber criminals. According to the security review, the United Kingdom will provide high focus on cyber criminals. The report includes this statement (at point 4.114):

“Most of the cyber criminals threatening the UK are based overseas, often exploiting the anonymity of the internet or the absence of effective cyber law enforcement in their host countries. We will disrupt the activities of cyber criminals overseas through prosecution and other means. We will create a new intelligence unit dedicated to tackling the criminal use of the ‘dark web’.”

The latter mentioned “new intelligence unit” has been created, it’s the Joint Operations Cell (JOC), which is an agency created by the collaboration of NCA and the GCHQ. We have already published an article about this, which you can check it at THIS LINK.

It looks like that the new task force will focus mainly on cyber criminals from overseas, however, the security review also mentioned that they will provide more manpower to local law enforcement authorities in order to stop cyber crime from happening in the United Kingdom. The full statement for this goes by:

“Since 2010, we have invested in new law enforcement capabilities, including establishing the National Cyber Crime Unit within the NCA. We have improved the skills of law enforcement officers and our understanding of cyber crime. We will reinforce law enforcement’s specialist capabilities, making it more difficult for cyber criminals to operate from within the UK. We will work with industry to strengthen our ability to disrupt cyber crime, sharing more information on the threat.”

Also, since there have been huge cyber attacks on the UK banking systems, which resulted in the loss of many customers’ personal and financial details to the hands of hackers, the United Kingdom’s government decided to spend more on cyber defense and prevention:

“We will invest £1.9 billion over the next five years in protecting the UK from cyber attack and developing our sovereign capabilities in cyber space. In 2016 we will publish a second five-year National Cyber Security Strategy, and we will launch a further five-year National Cyber Security Programme,” states the report.

Since the attacks by the hackers were mostly against UK companies, the government also plans to help them with the protection of their data by providing them specialist help. They will simplify “private sector access to government cyber security advice”, and the country’s newly created National Cyber Centre, which will operate under GCHQ leadership in order to “respond quickly and effectively” to cyber attacks, will form a single point of contact for companies that are seeking advice.

Updated: 2015-11-26