Met police force moves to boost e-crime prevention

The Metropolitan Police specialist crime directorate is to hold a series of e-crime prevention and response seminars for employers.

The three quarterly seminars aim to raise awareness and improve the skills of IT security professionals, corporate managers and corporate investigators.

They will be held during 2005 and are aimed at improving companies' incident response plans for managing internal and joint police investigations, while giving an overview of the strategic threat from e-crime.

The first session for corporate managers is to be held in London on 1 March 2005.

Computer crime costs businesses far more than physical crime but receives only a fraction of police resources, a report published today by the European Information Society Group and the Institute for Public Policy Research said.

Despite these risks, less than 1 per cent of UK police officers have been trained to gather computer evidence and there are fewer than 100 experts in the UK capable of analysing computer evidence to court standards.