The Met police quadruples its cybercrime unit to tackle Lulzsec and Anonymous

THE LONDON METROPOLITAN POLICE has quadrupled its cybercrime unit over the last two months in an effort to deal with a spate of online attacks from hacker groups.

The Met's E-crime unit now has 85 officers, four times what it had a few months back, thanks largely to a huge boost of £30m to its budget designed to help it tackle the growing problem of online hacking.

The move is a direct response to hacker groups like Lulzsec and Anonymous, which claim they are not breaking the law, but rather using a legitimate form of protest online.

According to The Guardian, the head of the Met's E-crime unit, detective superintendent Charlie McMurdie issued a warning to those orchestrating or participating in this form of cybercrime by saying, "What [Lulzsec and Anonymous are] doing isn't civil disobedience, it's serious crime."

The groups, Anonymous in particular, tend to focus attacks for a particular political purpose, such as exposing corruption or fighting for freedom of speech online, as in support of the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks.

The groups have even targeted law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and CIA in the US and the Serious Organised Crime Agency in the UK, which has ensured that they gained the attention of police forces around the world.

Several individuals allegedly connected with the groups have been arrested in the UK recently, which suggests the new resources in the Met's E-crime unit have been paying off. These arrests included those of teenagers Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, the latter of whom is believed to be the hacker known as 'Topiary', a key member of Lulzsec.

Scotland Yard recently warned that illegal use of computers, including participating in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, could result in up to 10 years porridge. µ