Troels Oerting, the head of Europol’s Cybercrime Centre has made a passionate plea for extra surveillance powers to counter cybercrime.
Reacting to protracted criticism of him from the privacy community in a speech at Information Security Solutions Europe in Brussels, Oerting stated that the recent revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were now damaging the ability of the police to fight organised crime.
Repeating his earlier assertion that 85% of the attacks that Europol were having to deal with were coming from Russia and that the perpetrators were relatively few in number.
“There are only a small number of very proficient criminals, we are talking in hundreds, and we do know who a lot of them are,” said Oerting
In a frank outburst, Oerting pointed out that the results could be catastrophic with anonymity being conferred on criminals who are already technologically in advance of the police and the authorities not able to protect the public from cyber crime.
“I don’t want to protect the cyber savvy I want to protect my mother and father, and my brother and sister,” said Oerting, adding that soon four billion people will be online, many of those from Africa.
“I was recently in Singapore and there you can see people selling operating systems on the streets for a couple of dollars. Fine you might think, but you might not get updates, or it might be infected.
“When the people in Africa start to come online what do you think they will do? Pay for a full operating system or buy a cheaper pirated version?”
A situation Oerting said can only lead to a proliferation of cybercrime, because pirated software will make the people of the continent victims and lead to opportunities for the development of cyber crime in the area.
To prevent cyber-criminals and head off the acceleration in online crime Oerting claims that the police must have additional powers to combat cyber-criminals, and that the face-off between privacy activists and the authorities prompted by the Snowden Affair must be defused.
Oerting made a plea for the different interest groups in the technology community to come together to fight cybercrime rather than protect their own sectional political interests arguing that the fight was about simple morality and not the ideological positions of different parts of the technology community.
“We need to get away from IT religions and get into reality.”
To hear Oerting’s on the PassWord radio programme’s big interview on ResonanceFM tune in on 104.4 fm in London or listen online on www.resonancefm.com
