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

Yeah, tell me about it...

[heironymouscoward]

My Brussels company is actually involved in a cybercrime case (one of our ex-employees woke up one day and decided he wanted to trash our CVS).

The EU has had a cybercrime convention that was passed into law in Belgium in 2000, three years ago. The very first case is currently appearing in court. Until today, cybercrimes have mostly been classified under random sections of the criminal act such as "theft of electricity", "abuse of confidential information", and so on.

Belgium actually has a specialized cybercrime cell in the prosecutor's office. But it's still a very new area and could do with some better coverage. Few people know, for instance, that hacking one's own company is actually considered much more serious than hacking from "the outside", in the case of our departed hacker, worth between 18 months and 3 years in prison.

No-one really knows what counts as "evidence" either, and since laws in most European countries are not based on court cases but on statutory definitions, we don't even know if emails and expert's reports count as evidence.

I think cybercrime will be very important in the years ahead, as more and more business-critical information is stored in databases that can be accessed from the other side of the world if one knows the correct passwords.