2
FUTURESCOT
BRIEFING
28 April 2016
FutureScot
DI Eamonn Keane, of Police
Scotland’s specialist crime
division, speaking at the
Scot-Secure conference
last week. Picture: Nicola Kenny
FutureScot is an independent
publication by BrandScotland.
CONTENTS
2 BRIEFING.
4 DATACENTRES.
5 ENCRYPTION.
6 HACKING.
7 CLOUD.
8 INTERVIEW.
10 COVER STORY.
12 CYBERSECURITY.
14 ENTERPRISE.
15 BIG DATA.
16 SKILLS.
17 RECRUITMENT.
18 LEGAL.
19 INVESTMENT.
EDITOR Will Peakin
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DEPUTY EDITOR Kevin O’Sullivan
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ADVERTISING Jake Oszczepalinski
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PUBLISHER Hamish Miller
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‘Spearpfishing,
smishing and
whaling’ – we’re
struggling to
keep up, admits
cyber cop
Police Scotland hope for co-operation
between officers and business
as it fights against a rising tide of
automated and industrial hacking
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BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN
New and constantly evolving forms of
cybercrime have left Police Scotland
“struggling” to keep up, one of its
senior cyber officers has said.
Online and device-specific threats
such as ‘spearphishing’, ‘smishing’
and ‘whaling’, coupled with existing
cybercrime, have left officers facing a
“significant investigative challenge”.
“What we are seeing, and I don’t like
using the term ‘pandemic’ because that
is a bit alarmist, but I would say what
we are seeing now from these companies, organisations like DD4BC, you
will see that they are using ransomware and DDOS, and cybercrime-asa-service to target specific companies
within jurisdictions,” said DI Eamonn
Keane, of Police Scotland’s Specialist
Crime Division.
Keane spoke to FutureScot ahead of
the Scot Secure Cyber Security conference at Our Dynamic Earth on April
21, where he gave a talk on ‘being the
hunter’.
He said it was almost impossible to
quantify the totality of cyber-attacks
faced by Scottish business as many go
unreported. But he said there was a
level of co-operation now between officers and business that was encouraging. “I’m delighted to say we’re getting
much more traction and engagement
from our business community and
we’re here to support them,” he said.
However, he indicated that the
multi-jurisdictional scale of hacking
presents a considerable challenge to
the force. “It’s on an automated and in-
dustrial scale,” he said. “There are new
crimes – and we in Police Scotland, yes
we are absolutely struggling. We face a
significant investigative challenge and
resources dealing with all aspects of
cybercrime and social media abuse.”
Police Scotland has itself fallen
victim to a “number of incidents where
there have been intrusions” – and one
individual arrested for attacking the
force is due to come to court.
Keane also indicated that the level
of boardroom attacks on ‘C-suite executives’ (chief-level in an enterprise)
appeared to be on the rise – either
through ‘social engineering’ (using open source online platforms to
research and target potential victims),
or through ransomware.
“The landscape would be that we
have now a small but significant body
of what we could call hacking teams
they are now interested in looking at
vulnerabilities in organisations.”
There have been recent calls from
the Scottish Police Federation to create
a dedicated ‘National Cyber Crime
unit’ for Scotland. Keane declined to
echo the calls from the policing union
but said he supports the idea of closer,
collaborative working with partners,
particularly with business..
“We’ve got some fantastic defence
technology in Scotland, the likes of
Lockheed Martin and Sopra Steria
– and we need that help to assist in
policing sometimes,” he added.
Police Scotland is also working with
global tech corporations to try and
identify malicious code and “suck it
out” of the internet, he said.