UK police 'not prioritising cybercrime', Microsoft says
The Home Office is not taking cybercrime and related fraud seriously enough, Microsoft says.
The software giant says that cybercrime reporting mechanisms in the UK have been inadequate, since the closure of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), whose operations were folded into the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) last year. Its critique comes in a hard-hitting submission to a House of Lords Science and Technology Committee inquiry into internet security.
In a written submission to the committee ahead of its oral testimony last week, Microsoft described the scope of the cybercrime problem as "wide and growing". The 22-page document contains a number of significant factoids about the scale of the problem. Microsoft describes internet security problems as encompassing spam messages ("of which we block over three billion a day in Hotmail/Windows Live Mail"), phishing attacks (aiming to tricking users into handing over login credentials for online accounts), malware, spyware, Trojans, viruses and bots.
