With the ever growing level of cyber attacks, sharing information about the types of threats, collaborative approach can be the only effective way to fight against these humongous nature of new crimes, said a prominent security expert from the UK.
Experts suggest that while conventional levels of crimes are fought, new forms of criminal activities are rising at an alarming rate. Cyber crimes, online frauds, money laundering, and terrorism have grown rapidly, which are posing an increasing level of danger to all.
Lord Stevens (pictured), former Head of Metropolitan Police (UK), in his address at the opening session of the 3rd Information Security Conference, highlighted that the world continues to change with regard to cyber criminality at the backdrop of social transformation, including global economic downturn, increasing migration, widening inequality and impact of social media.
“In the previous edition of this conference, we agreed that we are facing storm of increasing threat in relation to cyber crimes. However, I think we have been conservative in our estimation given the enormous scale of cyber crimes we have witnessed over the last one year,” said Lord Stevens, who is considered to be the most respected Metropolitan Police Commissioner in modern times.
“Information sharing is crucial with regard to fight against the nature of cyber attacks that we are facing today. The defence has to be collaborative and clever the way it is designed. The only way to do this is through sharing information about the types of threats faced and the technical defences developed”, he added. He said that financial institutions and government agencies are no longer the only target of cyber criminals. In whichever sector big money is involved they are the target of such crimes.
He noted there have been attacks on big companies which are household names and having vital information about millions of people. “Within the last year, we have had 35,000 customers’ credit card data stolen… The largest data attack in history came when Yahoo confirmed this year that information associated with 500 million user accounts had been stolen.”
The former top cop, said that the breaches on this scale, with the sensitivity of the information taken, are “extremely worrying”.
