Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska this Wednesday unveiled his department’s strategy to deal with the remarkable increase in cybercrime in Spain, where “one in five crimes is committed online”. In 2022, the state security forces and organs recorded 375,506 crimes, 72% more than in the reference year 2019 before the pandemic. The response to this threat, which affects companies, institutions and individuals, is a public awareness and awareness campaign – with a commercial and subsequent action on networks with informative messages – and a larger endowment of the Office of Cybersecurity Coordination (OCC), the will become a sort of “observatory” for trends in cybercrime.
“The dual effect of the decline in conventional crime and the increase in cybercrime has brought us to a turning point: today, one in five crimes in Spain is committed online,” explained Grande-Marlaska, who has defended the need to “alert and raise public awareness, because, according to experts, cybercrime and its consequences have not yet had the necessary social impact.”
Although Marlaska warned that the data provided is preliminary pending consolidation, he pointed out that “the vast majority of this cybercrime is fraud or computer fraud, a typology that fits 336,778 of the recorded breaches, almost 90% of the total” .
The first phase of the awareness campaign includes a TV spot and a graphic ad format for both print and outdoor media. It aims to draw public attention to the lack of protection and prevention with which it is common to interact in the digital world and the serious consequences this attitude can have. “The same protection guidelines must be observed in the physical space as in the virtual one,” said Marlaska.
Self-protection as the key
In a second phase, the campaign jumps to social networks, where experts from both the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police and Civil Guard warn about the various cybercrimes that are being discovered or are occurring more frequently, and explain the basic guidelines to protect us from them. “We intend to increase citizens’ trust in the state security forces and corps as the first public tool in the fight against cybercrime, create a willingness to report any illegal acts suffered, and we ask citizens to help us protect them , because it will be very difficult if they don’t first realize that they need to protect themselves from cybercrime,” added Grande-Marlaska.
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Alongside the awareness campaign, the Home Secretary has said more relevant is the assignment of greater executive capacity to the Cybersecurity Coordination Office (OCC), a body that links the Secretary of State for Security with the national reference centers for incident response.
This office, with reinforced staff, will become the Department of the Interior’s Cyber Incident Response Center in support of the Criminal Investigation Department (CSIRT-MIR-Judicial Police). According to this change, it will provide technical support to the technical units of the state security forces and corps, and assume the functions delegated to the State Secretary for Security as the competent authority in matters of network security and information systems for the operators and critical services.
This cybersecurity coordination office will also become a cybercrime observatory with the task of monitoring, detecting, processing and analyzing criminal trends on the Internet, “because this preparation of police intelligence is essential to face the new challenges and threats in the digital sphere “.
five million euros
In addition, for the first time, the Secretary of State for Security will have a specific budget of five million euros to cover the necessary investments to provide the appropriate technological capacities both to the Cyber Security Coordination Office and to the police units, the National Guard and the Civil Guard specialized in the prevention and prosecution of cybercrime.
At this point, Grande-Marlaska recalled that the staff of the central and peripheral units of the National Police and Civil Guard, specialized in cybersecurity, had almost doubled in the last four years: if in 2018 these units had a total of 714 agents, by the end of 2022 this number rose to 1,352 soldiers.