Owned: National Hi-Tech Crime Unit website

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 17:07

Your IT - Home IT

When the BBC recently reported on the extradition battle of NASA hacker Gary McKinnon, it linked to the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit website. Indeed, many news and security sites around the world do the same. Yet visit NHTCU.org today and you can book a German holiday. What the heck is going on?

The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit used to be the central policing hub as far as computer crime investigation was concerned in the United Kingdom.

The emphasis being on used to be. You see the NHTCU actually ceased to be back in April 2006 when it was absorbed by the Serious Organised Crime Unit.

The trouble is, that many people do not seem to realise this. At least as far as web references go in any case.

Unfortunately, the problem would seem to be firmly at the feet of the UK Government which has not adopted the standard best practise strategy for such situations and used the NHTCU website to redirect visitors to the SOCA one instead.

That would be bad enough, but things stray into farcical territory when you discover that even worse than this the UK Government has not even bothered to maintain ownership of the domain.

Yes, you read that right: the domain globally associated with the specialist police squad that had a responsibility to investigate Identity Theft amongst other things has been left to lapse.

No wonder that it was snapped up last month by some enterprising type then, a German chap who seems to be using it to market a German hotel.

Although I would not go as far as to say that the NHTCU has had its identity stolen, I do agree with the sentiment of senior Sophos technology consultant Graham Cluley when he says that "If you can steal the identity of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit from right under the Government's nose then what message does that give the world about the state of the nation's computer security?"

Good question, what message does this give about UK computer security? Who is the new owner of the NHTCU website and what is he doing with it? Why is this such a problem? Find out on page 2...

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