Europol, the European police agency, will lead one of the largest international consultations into cybercrime that will help governments, law enforcement and businesses to gain an advantage over cybercriminals.
Project 2020, the study by the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance and led by Europol, will analyse current trends in cybercrime and with a view to how they may evolve over the next eight years and beyond.
The past two years have seen the industrialisation of cybercrime, where criminals can draw on an entire supporting infrastructure of criminal service providers, from web hosting to generating credit card verification data.
"During the past 24 months, critical infrastructure in countries around the world has been under daily cyberattack from both organised criminal networks and state-sponsored entities," says John Lyons, the chief executive of the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance.
Europol expects these threat scenarios to evolve rapidly, as cloud computing services mean that users are not always aware with whom data is being entrusted. The "internet of things", or the machine to machine internet, could see the hacking of medical devices and key infrastructure components, according to the alliance.
"With two-thirds of the world yet to join the Internet, we can expect to see new criminals, new victims and new kinds of threats," said Dr Victoria Baines, strategic advisor on Cybercrime at Europol.
Project 2020 will combine the expertise of leading law enforcement agencies with that of the ICSPA’s member companies, organisations and professional communities.
The European Commission recently designated Europol as its information hub on Cybercrime and asked the agency to establish the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). Also contributing to the study will be the City of London Police and the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).
Among the business members joining Project 2020 are payment services firm Visa Europe, fraud prevention services firm Transactis and logistics company Yodel. They will be joined by seven of the world’s leading cyber security companies, such as McAfee, CGI Canada, Atos, Cassidian, Digiware, Core Security and Trend Micro.
Also participating in Project 2020 are experts from two global professional communities – the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2 and the International Association of Public Prosecutors.
"During the past few years increasingly sophisticated and highly targeted cyberattacks have resulted in significant losses-not only financial but also, potentially even more worryingly, of intellectual property in defence and aerospace, oil and petrochemicals, financial services, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals," said Lyons. "Cybercrime is notoriously difficult to tackle given the international structure and capabilities of some of the criminal networks we see in operation. It used to be inherently difficult to combine international efforts to fight cybercrime; this Project will for the first time, bring together experts globally, with a remit to identify and fix weaknesses in our systems before they come to market."
"Cybercrime evolves as quickly as technology, and technology develops so quickly that the unthinkable becomes mainstream before we can imagine. Furthermore, criminals today can still surprise us as they move from region to region around the world. We have the groups around the table who can make sure this will no longer be the case," says Europol’s Dr Baines, who will be the Project Director for Project 2020.
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