£30m boost to fight cyber-crime

The Metropolitan Police has beefed up its cyber-crime unit – quadrupling the number of staff over the last two months – in an effort to deal with a spate of online attacks from hacker groups.
The E-crime unit now has 85 officers, thanks largely to a £30m injection to its budget. The move is a direct response to hacker groups like Lulzsec and Anonymous, which claim they are not breaking the law, but rather using a legitimate form of protest online.
Head of the E-crime unit detective superintendent Charlie McMurdie issued a warning to those orchestrating or participating in this form of cyber-crime by saying, “What [Lulzsec and Anonymous are] doing isn’t civil disobedience, it’s serious crime.”
The groups have been responsible for a number of high profile attacks on brands, including the Sony PlayStation Network, as well as law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and CIA in the US and the Serious Organised Crime Agency in the UK.
Several individuals allegedly connected with the groups have been arrested in the UK recently, including teenagers Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, who is believed to be the hacker known as ‘Topiary’, a key member of Lulzsec.
Scotland Yard recently warned that illegal use of computers, including participating in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, could result in jail terms of up to 10 years.