EU Hi-Tech Crime Agency Created

Gori writes "The European Union is setting up an agency to co-ordinate work to combat the rising tide of cybercrime. The European Network and Information Security Agency will help educate the public about viruses, hacker attacks and other security problems. It will also act as a co-ordinator for Europe-wide investigations into virus outbreaks or electronic attacks. ENISA has a budget of 24.3m euros (17m), will start work in 2004 and will initially be based in Brussels."

Comments

Re:What kind of "hackers" will they catch?

[potcrackpot]

Fool!

The article says:

"[ENISA] will help educate the public about viruses, hacker attacks and other security problems. It will also act as a co-ordinator for Europe-wide investigations into virus outbreaks or electronic attacks."

Seems clear enough to me: virus writers, denial of service attackers, but not spammers.

Re:exchange rate is wrong

[JeffSh]

*sigh*

read the article on BBC and noticed they quoted it as 17 million POUNDS.

why was the pound symbol left out of the slashdot posting? weird..

European Security Agency?

[mashx]

When I first read this, my first thought is that it seems to be a sneaky way to introduce a European equivalent of the NSA, without the security concerns that would involve on each member nation of the EU. It might only have a small budget now, but if the general idea is not to be too obvious that makes sense. The fact that its role will be up for reassessment in four years time could be used as an indicator for that.

I'll put my tinfoil hat back in the cupboard for another day.

Re:No let-up for MS within the EU

[Ianoo]

Also they produce lots of Mac OSX software. There's also Internet Explorer for UNIX, although I've never seen it in action, it's very very rare.

Re:This smells fishy !

[Elektroschock]

http://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/enisa/index .html - ENISA Mailing list

EU Agenciencies are quite distributed...

[Kinniken]

According to the official list (http://europa.eu.int/agencies/index_en.htm), the 15 current agencies are located in:

THESSALONIKI, Greece
DUBLIN, Ireland
COPENHAGEN, Danemark
TORINO, Italy
LISBON, Portugal
LONDON, UK
ALICANTE, Spain
BILBAO, Spain
ANGERS, France
LUXEMBOURG, Luxembourg
VIENNA, Austria
THESSALONIKI, Greece (again!)

The last three are new and do not have fixed locations yet. So it looks like the EU agencies are in fact concentrated in... THESSALONIKI, Greece! At least one of the new agencies will probably end up in Finland - not quite Sweden but not too far out either ;-)
Note that those are EU agencies, working in a specific field, and not EU institutions, like the Commission, the Parliament, or the ECB. The first two belong in Brussel IMHO - placing one in Portugal and the other in Finland would be good "decentralisation", but it would simply multiply traveling expenses.