Report reveals that the threat from cybercrime is increasing significantly and additional funding is needed.
It was revealed in the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) National strategic assessment of serious organised crime 2019 report, that an extra £2.7bn investment is needed to tackle serious organised crime over the next three years.
The report warned that “the threat from cybercrime to the UK is continuing to evolve” in complexity, with the biggest cybercrime threat to the UK coming from financial trojans created by Russian language organised criminal gangs (OCGs).
The report announced that ransomware remains a highly visible part of the threat landscape, whilst spam and phishing emails remain the primary malware infection methods.
The report emphasised that UK-based virtual infrastructure has increasingly been identified in law enforcement investigations, however, it remains unclear whether this is due to growing criminal use of UK hosting services or due to the improved law enforcement ability to detect criminal assets.
Law enforcement has grown more aware of the crossovers between prominent cyber OCGs with malware that is associated with different OCGs – which are appearing more regularly together in the same campaign.
“These malware crossovers are likely to indicate that cybercriminals from different groups are working more closely together than previously assessed,” the report said.
The NCA identified that financial data is the most coveted by cybercriminals. The report said:
“Improved global credit card security is highly likely to have encouraged criminals to target CVV data of the type ‘scraped’ from payment pages during high-profile breaches in 2018.”
European Data Protection Summit will take place on June 3rd in Central London and will play host to 800 DPO’s, Security Professionals and senior business decision makers looking for; information, updates, clarity, advice and solutions. For more information, visit the website.
