19 April 2007

Britain developing e-crime reporting portal

British computer security experts have announced their intention to create a portal that would help report and pool information on internet crime.

The announcement was made on Wednesday by the non-profit organization Voice (Victims of Internet Crime Europe) at the Third Annual International Conference on Global E-security at the University of East London.

Hamid Jahankhani, who lectures on computing and business information systems at UEL, said the venture would also help raise awareness of the problem of internet crime.

It is hoped the simple nature of the portal will increase reporting of this type of crime and put the issue of e-crime on the agenda.

Internet users currently do not know where to turn to, and many cases of internet fraud and related crimes go unreported.

David Lilburn Watson, a computer forensic expert and head of forensic computing at UEL, further argued that there was a sense that e-crime was on the rise, but gathering statistics and getting a sense of trends is difficult with current systems.

Europe currently has no system in place to track internet crime victims; the US does have portals such as the Internet Crime Complaint Center, run by the FBI.

But Jahankhani and Watson envision a more ambitious portal that will have statistical tracking systems already in place.

It is hoped the portal will attract some EU funding, and the idea has been informally floated to industry groups and companies.

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