Welsh e-crime reporting website to go live January
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
The live date has been delayed by security testing....
The UK’s first official e-crime reporting website, which will serve as the centrepiece of the newly-formed Welsh e-crime unit, is due to go live in January 2008, later than originally planned, Information Age has learnt.
Speaking to Information Age, Simon Lavin, planning and development manager of the new e-crime unit, said that the website has now been specified and designed. “We are now at the point of pushing the live button in January of next year,” he added.
Katherine Hibbert, e-Crime Wales project manager said that, due to the sensitive nature of the website, through which Welsh businesses will be able to report incidents of e-crime, the development of the website has taken longer than anticipated. “It takes quite a while to be tested and to make sure it’s secure, so it’s taken longer than we would have liked,” she told Information Age. “The website is central to the unit,” she added.
The portal will be the first in the UK, if not the world, to offer an official and online mechanism – devised in collaboration between law-enforcement agencies, and public and private sector organisations – for reporting and recording e-crime. Welsh businesses will be able to report incidents of e-crime through a secure online form, and will have the option of anonymity, said Hibbert.
“The idea is to encourage people to report e-crime through the police, but we realise that quite a lot of businesses are embarrassed about admitting to being a victim of an e-crime. But we do need to know if they are victims so we have a better idea of what the figures are.”
Currently, incidents of e-crime are vastly under-reported, added Lavin, “but we’ve no idea by how much”. Serious incidents reported on the website will be followed up by the e-crime unit, added Hibbert.
According to detective chief superintendent Chris Corcoran, chair of the All-Wales E-crime Steering Group, which parented the Welsh e-crime unit, the website will play a vital role in the unit’s first major objective of “scoping out” the nature of e-crime. “The next stage will be to analyse that data and work out who is most vulnerable and why,” he told Information Age.
“We’ll know more about the crime and therefore the more prevention advice we can give and then hopefully the less vulnerable people and businesses will become,” he added.
