McAfee Trains U.K. Law Enforcement on Cybercrime

Cybercrime – McAfee Provides Hands-on Training To U.K. Law Enforcement to Combat Cybercrime

This week law enforcement officials in the U.K. received some specialized training to help them identify and combat criminal activity in an effort make the world a safer place. For this training, officials could check their firearms at the door, as this was not the traditional training law enforcement agents receieve.

Experts from McAfee this week provided hands on malware investigation and forensics training to investigators from the Police Central eCrime Unit (PCeU) and the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) in the U.K.

The training brought together cybercrime specialists from PCeU and SOCA and focused on enhancing their knowledge and technical skills required to combat the latest malicious software techniques used by cybercriminals, as well as sharing computer forensics techniques.

“The policing of e-crime faces the challenge of keeping pace with technological advances,” said Detective Chief Inspector Terry Wilson of The Police Central e-crime Unit. “Hackers and virus writers have evolved from largely enthusiastic amateur ‘criminals’ to financially motivated, organized global criminal enterprises.”

Cybercrooks continue to rapidly evolve and churn out attacks. McAfee collected nearly 17 million samples of malware, in 2009, more than in all previous years combined. The recent “Operation Aurora” attack on Google and dozens of other companies is one example of cybercrimininals’ increasingly sophisticated tactics.

The effort by McAfee to train U.K. law enforcement specialists is part of the McAfee Initiative to Fight Cybercrime, an initiative aimed at closing gaps in the fight against cybercrime and make a practical and measurable impact on decreasing criminal activity.

Last year McAfee trained cybercrime investigators in the Balkan region in cooperation with the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE).

The McAfee Initiative to Fight Cybercrime includes calls for action from law enforcement, academia, service providers, government, the security industry and society at large to deliver more effective investigations and prosecutions of cybercrime.