The Commons Science and Technology committee have asked for Forces to receive more training to deal with "dangers faced by everyday users of the internet".

It comes in the same week that the Metropolitan Police Service was forced to apologise for giving out the data of more than a thousand victims of crime in a botched online survey.

The Information Commissioner's Office has said it is looking into that situation but the Commons committee believe that overall e-crime education is currently lacking.

"The internet can be a confusing place, and that provides opportunity for criminals and criminal behaviour," the committee said in its report.

"High-profile cases of criminal behaviour tend to be those that involve large sums of money or threaten national security. Towards that end we recommend that the government take steps to improve general knowledge about cybercrime among all policemen in the UK."

Another issue is the lack of statistics about the scale of e-crime, which meant the committee had to take the majority of their data from security vendors but senior security consultant Graham Cluley argues that this should not take away from the reports findings.

"If the data primarily comes from people making money out of [computer security], people could say: 'Well, you would say that' - but the data must be taken seriously," he said.

Click here to read the report in full
Posted 03/02/2012 by richard.hook@pavpub.com