Cybercrime under control?

Back in August we reported on a surprisingly visionary paper from the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, which requested urgent government action against cybercrime. Last Friday Blogzilla commented that the official government response was disappointing. The government's response has been that all is well, all legislation is fit for purpose, policing is good, and that the government is "formulating an information assurance strategy for Government". Beware regulators when they assure you that they are formulating strategies. That usually means that they are sitting around twiddling their thumbs, but I digress.

Today the BBC reports that the peers at the Science and Technology committee have not liked this reply, and we cannot really blame them. The Earl of Erroll (try saying that really fast) went as far as to mention heads and sand, and that cannot be a good thing.

Seriously though, according to APACS, card not present fraud in the first semester of this year reached 50% of all card fraud fraud, online banking losses had exceeded £7 million GBP (about $14.4 million USD), and they had handled 7,224 reported phishing incidents. Nothing to worry about indeed.