McAfee training up UK law enforcers

Law enforcers are ill-equipped to deal with growing cyber crime levels on their own

Security giant McAfee stepped up its outreach programme this week by inviting members of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Met’s Police Central eCrime unit (PCeU) to its labs to receive expert training.

The move to train UK law enforcement specialists is part of the McAfee Initiative to Fight Cybercrime, and came partly as a recognition of the fact that many agencies are poorly resourced.

Earlier this month, the PCeU revealed that a proposed £1m funding boost from the Home Office had been withdrawn as part of the coalition government’s austerity measures.

“Many of these organisations are under-resourced but the malware creators and attack methods are changing so rapidly it’s difficult for them to keep up,” McAfee chief technology officer George Kurtz told V3.co.uk.

“Given we have such visibility it makes sense to show them what we’re seeing in a hands-on environment.”

Kurtz explained that the McAfee Labs team in Aylesbury has been showing law enforcement specialists the underlying technologies and techniques used by cyber criminals today, such as “social footprinting”.

This is a method employed with increasing frequency, by which criminals analyse users’ social interactions on the web with a view to carrying out social engineering or other attacks which could compromise a victim’s system.

Kurtz added that working more closely with law enforcers in this way helps build up trust between both parties.

“By establishing this relationship we’re more likely to get called up [during investigations] as a trusted adviser – as you saw with the Aurora stuff,” he said. “It’s helpful to get experts involved in the process early on.”