2020 Publications

Keeping business afloat must take into account the unique cybersecurity needs of now-remote workers who are connecting to potentially unsecured home networks while accessing company resources from personal devices. The COVID-19 threat built slowly and hit hard, taking many by surprise when lockdown arrived and forcing businesses to evaluate at short notice how they’d be able to function as remote organisations. While cybercriminals had previously ramped up attacks on organizations and dialled down their advances on consumers over the last two years, they had to quickly adjust to a hybrid approach, targeting personal and work systems in order to smoke out at risk employees and vulnerable remote networks.

Ransomware continues to plague organizations, with over half of companies surveyed across 26 countries revealing that they were hit by ransomware in the last year. Such attacks are ever increasing in complexity and are getting more efficient at exploiting network and system vulnerabilities, leaving organizations with a significant clean-up bill. Modern firewalls are highly effective at defending against these types of attacks, but they need to be given the chance to do their job. This whitepaper discusses how these attacks work, how they can be stopped, and best practices for configuring your firewall and network to give you the best protection possible.

Open publication

In more normal times 2019 might still feel like a year of almost paralysing uncertainty, the sources of that paralysis being all too familiar since 2016. While parliament seemed deadlocked by the constitutional conundrum of Brexit, the fight against fraud quietly made some useful gains.

As with all crises, the confusion, uncertainty and raw fear spread by the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the fraud calculus in favour of the fraudsters. Post-pandemic, when the world settles into its new, socially-distanced, remote-working ‘normal’, fraud fighters everywhere expect to be playing catch-up as they face a wave of crisis related frauds.

Open publication

Companies across various industries are experiencing increased operational and financial pressure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These pressures create a heightened level of economic risks which may lead to increased motivation or justification to commit fraud, through manipulation of financial results, misrepresentation of facts, misappropriation of assets and other fraud schemes.

Open publication

This report focusses on specific corruption risks in major planning decisions, an area where there is often a large amount of money at stake. It is also very contentious, with many new developments resulting in a net loss of social and genuinely affordable housing, which in many areas are in short supply. To understand what could undermine openness in the planning process and what local authorities are doing to stop this, we have collected evidence from across England. Although there are some examples of good practice, generally the results make for a worrying read.

Open publication

The fundamental challenge that public bodies face with fraud is it is a hidden crime – those committing it actively try to conceal it so we must be proactive in our efforts to seek it out. The National Fraud Initiative (NFI), the Cabinet Office’s data matching service, has enabled participating organisations to prevent and detect £245 million fraud and error in the period 1st April 2018 to 4th April 2020. This brings cumulative outcomes for NFI participants to £1.93 billion. The NFI has the ability to quickly address emerging risks through the targeted data matching pilots carried out throughout the two-year cycle. The scale of government COVID-19 emergency relief now offers a significant opportunity for fraudsters. It is for this reason the Cabinet Office will extend the NFI remit to help ensure COVID-19 emergency relief funding is only accessed by those that are entitled.

Open Publication

 We have seen a transformative period in our digital history, with privacy established as a mainstream concern, and with complex societal conversations increasingly asking data protection questions. This report shows the ICO has been at the centre of those discussions, from how facial recognition technology is used to how we protect children online. The Age Appropriate Design Code is the most important piece of work covered in this report, and shows the ICO at its best: tackling challenging issues, consulting with those affected and taking practical steps that will prompt important changes that benefit society.

Open publication

Responsibility for Government policy on public sector fraud rests in the Cabinet Office which is responsible for the counter fraud ‘profession’ and its function across the entirety of the public sector. Additionally, all major Government departments have dedicated units that investigate fraud related to their functions. Responsibility for investigating frauds against individuals and the private sector rests with the Home Office and myriad of investigative units in different law enforcement bodies (e.g. NCA, Regional and Organised Crime Units and individual police forces). The plethora of disparate fraud investigative units across Government and law enforcement means that there is little consistency or coherence in the overall effort to counter fraud.

Open Publication

This inspection followed on from HMICSFRS 2019 report Fraud: Time to Choose. Between April and June 2019, an inspection was made of ten police forces in England and Wales, all nine regional organised crime units, the NCA, Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau. With regards to the strategic approach to fraud, HMICFRS finds the law enforcement response to cyber dependent crime is good but could be better. For example, the national strategy for tackling cyber-dependent crime is well established but the extent to which police forces have adopted it varies. Often, police forces don’t fully understand the threat from cyber-dependent crime and rarely see it as a priority. As a result, there is too much variation in local responses to a national threat.

Open publication

This report focusses on the risks of fraud and corruption when councils procure and commission goods, works and services. The findings of this review have reinforced the message that there is no single solution for tackling the issue of fraud and corruption within procurement, but rather a range of measures that can be implemented to reduce the risks faced by the sector. This report highlights examples of good practice that councils already have in place and presents a series of anonymised case studies to demonstrate where councils have taken action against procurement fraud and corruption.

Open publication