Microsoft and members of the open source community have told a House of Lords science and technology committee that police in the UK lack the skills and expertise to deal effectively with cases of Internet crime.
The committee - which is currently conducting an inquiry in personal Internet security - was told by national technology officer for Microsoft UK Jerry Fishenden that reporting cyber crime is "extremely difficult" and the public are confused as to how they should go about it.
"It is necessary to have as easy a reporting mechanism as possible so that when people are victims of cyber crime or attempted cyber crime there is a streamlined reporting structure and ideally one body with responsibility for receiving those complaints and having appropriate resources to investigate and potentially initiate prosecutions where appropriate", says Fishenden.
Fishenden pointed out that the US does have a single point of reporting established by the FBI back in the 1990s - the Internet Crime Complaints Centre - which takes some 10,000+ complaints a year and has the authority and resources to investigate those complaints.
Establishing this type of scheme would also enable the industry to get a much better grip on the scale of the problem in the UK, he added.
Says Fishenden: "If I walked in to a police station tomorrow to report an on-line phishing attack, would it be treated in the same way as an attempted pick-pocketing? Is that a model we want to move to or do we want to have cyber-crime handled at the centre?"
Alan Cox, called to give evidence on behalf of the open source community, echoed that sentiment.
"If you walk up to the desk sergeant at a typical police station…he does not understand the problems (and why should he) and there is nowhere else to go," says Cox. "We need something which deals with electronic crime and computers, either an understanding in police stations or we need a central contact point."
In December last year Detective Superintendent Russell Day of the Metropolitan Police told an all-party parliamentary group on identity fraud that many banks were failing to report attacks on their systems either due to concerns over customer confidence or because a lack of confidence in the ability of the police to deal with cyber crimes.