Police CyberAlarm monitoring tool goes live with major upgrade

Since it was launched it has identified more than a billion potential malicious incidents.

The enhanced version of the free tool works alongside an organisation’s current cyber security products, such as the firewall, Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Protection System (IPS), Anti-Spam and Network Anti-Virus.

Data received by the Police CyberAlarm Server is then used to create regular reports on potential malicious activity as well as updates containing threat trends seen across the member network. businesses and organisations can then use this reported intelligence to update their defences to better protect themselves from cyber threats.

Vulnerability Scanning can be added and used to scan an organisation’s website and external IP addresses, providing regular reports of all known vulnerabilities.

Police CyberAlarm was initially launched as a pilot in the North West, North East, East Midlands and South Wales before being rolled out nationally in 2020 to all forces.

Commissioner of City of London Police, and national policing lead for cyber and economic crime, Angela McLaren said: “Due to the success of Police CyberAlarm, we have been able to secure extra funding from the Home Office to improve the system through additional functionality.

“We see alerts every day of potential vulnerability or suspicious activity via Police CyberAlarm to its members. It is a key tool in an organisation’s cyber resilience toolkit and the additional functionality will enable policing to help businesses better protect themselves.

“As well as the data collected helping members to better protect themselves, the information gathered also helps regional and force cybercrime teams to build a much better understanding of the scale, types and clusters of cyber threats directed at members across England and Wales.

“Policing has been able to use the information collected to enable the local and regional cybercrime teams to proactively warn members of new and emerging threats.”

In one case, Police CyberAlarm detected a UDP amplification attack, a very potent attack method that turns an organisation’s own equipment against it, causing the member organisation infrastructure to attack itself. Working with the Police CyberAlarm team, it was able to mitigate the effects of the attack stopping it from having any effect on its network.

In another case, a company, which was not a Police CyberAlarm member, fell victim to a ransomware attack that forced it to shut down business-critical systems. After contacting the police, Police CyberAlarm was installed, which was able to identify the method of the attack, which was communicated to the company to allow it to close the vulnerabilities that existed.

The company’s next Police CyberAlarm report indicated that almost 1.3 million attempts to gain access had been made in the week after the attack.

The data gathered by Police CyberAlarm also helps regional and force cybercrime teams to build a much better understanding of the scale, types and clusters of cyber threats . Policing has been able to use the information collected to enable the local and regional cybercrime teams to proactively warn members of new emerging, recent and zero-day threats.

To coincide with the launch of the enhanced version of Police CyberAlarm, a new website has also been unveiled to make it easier for potential member organisations to get further information about the benefits of becoming a member and sign up for free – https://cyberalarm.police.uk/