9,000 cyber crime reports flagged as 'security risk'

It has been revealed that thousands of reports of cyber crime were quarantined on a police database instead of being investigated because the computer system had labelled them a security risk.

The reports, made to Action Fraud and handed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), run by the City of London police, created a backlog that at one point stretched to approximately 9,000 reports of cyber crime and fraud. The Know Fraud database should have processed, assessed and distributed the reports among investigators, but the software designed to protect the computer system labelled them a security risk.

The software screens reports to identify security risks and places any in quarantine that could have a ‘potentially significant threat to the security of the database’ in order for them to be manually checked before being released. The types of risks it searches for are those used by hackers to bypass security measures and attack databases, systems and websites such as viruses and other malware.

Insp Matt Parr, who heads Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, said that there had been a problem in the ‘processing and distribution’ of the crimes to forces, and that the computer systems were ‘not talking to each other’. Therefore, the crime reports had ‘gone to a central hub for processing and gone no further’.