UK and US lead global charge against cybercrime

Leading information technology associations in the UK and US are joining forces to tackle the increasing problem of cybercrime.

At a global summit in October, members of the Computing Services and Software Association (CSSA) of the UK and the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) will discuss ways to improve computer security. The location has not yet been decided.

The transatlantic initiative comes after a spate of distributed denial of service (DoS) attacks on major websites including Yahoo, eBay and Amazon during the first two weeks in February.

Harris Miller, president of ITAA, speaking this week to vnunet.com, said: "In speeches I gave three years ago I said computer security was a huge challenge. After the denial of service attacks, suddenly it was on the front pages."

"It made security a little closer to the top of the list of things to do. People are buying into the idea, but it's not widespread yet," he added.

Miller was one of the IT industry representatives who advised US president Bill Clinton after the lastest wave of attacks.

"We need the money and we need the people to do the work. With Year 2000, it was only when the directors and chief executives got involved that things happened. We're not there yet with security."

The last major collaboration between the two bodies, which also involved a global summit, was in preparation for Y2K. "We're building on our Y2K programme, where our assocations in 41 countries around the world were involved, to do this. With Y2K we had the support of the OECD and the United Nations, and we're hoping for the same thing here," said Miller.

John Higgins, director general of the CSSA, said the UK IT industry is behind the US in tackling security issues. "It's about being responsible. I don't think our industry has been grown up enough. Until now, very little of it has been concerned with things on which major parts of life are hung."

DoS attacks jam web servers by bombarding them with rogue data packets from multiple unsuspecting hosts.