In an age where data protection is one of the biggest issues we face, Crowdsourcing is emerging as a strong means of defence…

The fight against cyber crime is a harsh and unpredictable battle ground. With cyber criminals finding new and devastating means of attack with each passing moment, the authorities have been searching for a means to strike back and protect Internet users the World over. Crowdsourcing may have just given them that means.

The director of Europol, Rob Wainwright told peers he wants to get net users directly involved in catching cyber crime gangs. He believes that cyber crime isn’t given the attention it merits in the EU and that the collective harnessing of net users, through Crowdsourcing, will give the EU the means to stifle the more organised and innovative cyber criminals. Cyber criminals are waging newer and sophisticated wars on the Internet with ‘Denial of service‘ attacks, as well as more traditional methods like botnets and phishing scams.

Mr Wainwright said Europol was stepping up its fight against internet-based crime ahead of the opening of a planned cyber crime centre, funded by the European Commission. He continued by saying Europol already had a “dedicated intelligence project designed to identify the most significant cyber criminals operating in Europe”, with the next stage being the launch of a Crowdsourced, “internet crime reporting online system”. The job of this system would be to ”collect all internet crime reported online at a national level, in a harmonised way across the EU”,  with the ability to alert police in the 27 member states to “connections between different investigations”.

The new system would allow concerned net users the chance to report their concerns and any potential crimes, most likely through a dedicated website. It could operate in a similar way to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a joint venture between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Centre, which has allowed victims of cyber crime to make a complaint online for the past 10 years.

Concerns have been raised over the quality of data that the system would report, bearing in mind the limited expertise of the average Internet user. Although this is a valid concern, just being alerted to a potentially deviant web page or activity would be valuable in itself. The idea of this Crowdsourced reporting system, although lacking in certain details, is definitely a step forward in the battle with the cyber criminals.

Let’s hope the might of the many will outweigh the cunning of the cyber criminal.