Pierluigi Paganini
June 29, 2014
“This agreement is an important step in the fight against ever more skilled cyber criminals who are investing more time, money and people on targeted attacks. Our agreement demonstrates that we are highly committed to jointly contributing within our respective areas of expertise, and to support each other’s work in the quest to make Europe a safer place online. Cybercrime is estimated to cost the global economy more than 400 billion dollars annually1, by cooperating more closely together and sharing expertise, we strengthen Europe’s capacity to combat cyber criminals.” is a joint statement issued by the Executive Director of ENISA, Professor Udo Helmbrecht, and Europol Director, Rob Wainwright, issued a joint statement.
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 criminal, 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.
The activities that both agencies daily carry on need resources and skills, information sharing on cyber threats is vital to persecute illicit activities that in many cases go unpunished. Recent successes in the fight to the organized crime like the takeover of the Zeus Gameover gang demonstrates the efficiency of a multinational effort, and the agreement signed by the agencies is an important message to IT security community and to the cybercrime itself.
Recently I wrote of another agreement between the NYPD, the FBI and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), who have announced the formation of a unified Financial Cyber Crimes Task Force, the accord is another demonstration of the need to contrast cyber crime with a joint effort between various law enforcement agencies.
Unfortunately the political and diplomatic relationship between governments have a serious impact on relations between countries and influence the collaboration and the information sharing between states.
It must be promoted the awareness that cybercrime is a shared threat that must be fought with a multinational effort and the agreement between ENISA and EUROPOL in an important step in the right direction.
There is no time to waste, cybercrime is already exploiting the gray zones in the local law frameworks and the lack of collaboration between many law enforcement agencies.
(Security Affairs – ENISA, EUROPOL)
