Europe Declares War on Cyber Crime

Europe Declares War on Cyber Crime

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16615578_m featureENISA and Europol have signed an agreement with the intent to facilitate the cooperation in the fight to the cyber criminal activities.

The fight to the cybercrime needs a joint effort of governments, law enforcement agencies and private entities. Cyber threats are becoming even more sophisticated and bad actors behind them are structured in efficient organizations difficult to track and dismantle.

Cybercrime is responsible for huge financial losses, McAfee recently issued a new report estimating the global cost of cybercrime, according the company we are facing with a lucrative industry that despite partial data could be costing the world economy as much as $575 billion annually. This could be the tip of the iceberg due to the difficulty to count all losses related to illicit activities, anyway the economic crisis is advantaging criminal ecosystem.

To respond to the emergency ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) and Europol (European Police Office) have signed this week a strategic cooperation agreement, the intent is to facilitate the cooperation between the agencies through the sharing of information useful in the fight against cybercrime.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

ENISA and Europol have a long-standing collaboration, ENISA is part of the EC3 Programme Board and respectively EC3 is part of ENISA’s Permanent Stakeholders Group. In the past, the agencies have collaborated to disseminate information on principal threats, to arrange cyber exercises such as CyberEurope and of course for enhancing CERT/law enforcement cooperation through different events.

The agreement reinforces the commitment is the fight against cyber criminals, a battle that involve different countries with different jurisdictions, for this reason it is essential a joint effort to investigate and prosecute the cyber crimes.