Businesses and organisations in the South East region are able to access Police CyberAlarm, an award-winning free tool funded by the Home Office and delivered by police forces in the region.

Since its launch, Police CyberAlarm has identified over a billion potential suspicious events resulting in reports and advice being given to members, enabling them to take action to prevent a successful attack.

How does Police CyberAlarm work?  As a member, Police CyberAlarm is a free tool to help you understand and monitor malicious cyber activity against your network. This service is made up of two parts: monitoring and vulnerability scanning.Police CyberAlarm will detect and provide regular reports of suspicious cyber activity, enabling your business or organisation to identify and take steps to minimise your vulnerabilities.

The data collected by the system only contains summary information (meta data and header information) about communications your business or organisation receives from the internet. The system is designed to protect personal data, trade secrets and intellectual property.Once you become a Police CyberAlarm member you install a virtual or physical ‘Police CyberAlarm Collector’ on your network, which will be used to collect and process traffic logs to enable the identification of suspicious and malicious activity from your firewall/internet gateway, Network Intrusion Detection/Prevention system (IDS/IPS), Network Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam filters.Police CyberAlarm is a monitoring system and does not interfere with normal network operations. There are two ways to install the data collector, and both are easy to do.

Police CyberAlarm in action

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, the member 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 which forced it to shut down business critical systems. After contacting the police, Police CyberAlarm was installed immediately by the company, 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.

As well as the data collected by Police CyberAlarm 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 being aimed 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 emerging, recent and zero-day threats.

To to get further information about the benefits of becoming a member and sign up for free today at https://cyberalarm.police.uk/