Oh Lord, make the banks pay for cybercrime

By Davey Winder
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 06:30

Home IT

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is urging the Government to introduce legislation to make banks pay for cybercrime coupled with a data security breach disclosure law for the UK.

There is a common perception amongst the British public and beyond, that members of the House of Lords can pretty much be summed up as a bunch of old duffers. Anyone who has watched the Parliament TV channel and seen their Lordships sleeping through debates and generally doing a good impression of Mr Burns and Grandpa Simpson will not disagree.

So when it decides to tackle an issue such as crime on the Internet, you might expect to be in for a roller coaster ride of technological misunderstanding and cultural misapprehension. Yet the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has actually managed to sit down, stay awake, and produce some reasonable recommendations in its report published Tuesday.

The follow-up report on Personal Internet Security calls on the Government to do more to protect the citizen from cybercrime.

One of the more controversial recommendations being that there should be legislation "to establish the principle that banks be held responsible for losses incurred by electronic fraud."

The Committee argues that it's just not satisfied with the official Government position, which says the existing Banking Code offers sufficient consumer protection. "The Committee received evidence that where a pin or password is used in an online fraud banks often refuse to refund customers claiming they must have been negligent or complicit in the fraud" their Lordships report. They also suggest that the Financial Services Ombudsman and the courts do not offer an adequate method of redress for customers whose banks refuse to cover their losses. "If banks were forced to accept liability for online fraud this would provide an incentive for them to improve the security of their online banking operations."

Hey, the old duffers might just have a point you know!

In fact, they have two more points. Read on to find out what they might be...

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