SOCA comes under the aegis of the Home Office, and Home Secretary Theresa May has written a foreword to the report. “SOCA is at the heart of our plans to create a new National Crime Agency,” she writes. “The NCA will work across different police forces and agencies to fight serious and organized crime, defend our borders, tackle economic and cyber crime, and protect children and vulnerable people.”
While all serious crime comes within its remit, SOCA is increasingly taking the lead against cybercrime, both within the UK and internationally. Much of the report discusses these wider issues, and it defines its actual remit as, “to prevent and detect serious organized crime and to contribute to the reduction of such crime in other ways and to the mitigation of its consequences.”
It does, however, briefly report on its role against cybercrime over the last year. In particular, it notes that “SOCA continued to build upon its influence and reach in internet governance through increasing partnerships with international law enforcement and leading on the global representation of law enforcement interests to ICANN.” It detected and reported on “several hundred cases of domain name abuse” to ICANN. Such alerts, it says, “disrupted a major online malware distribution group by preventing it from registering and using malicious domain names over a long term period.”
Other highlights of the year include the controversial collaboration with Virgin Media to locate and “warn customers on its network that they might have been infected with the dangerous SpyEye Trojan variant”; and the seizure of “over 1.2 million items of compromised payment card data from cybercriminals”.
For the future, SOCA sees itself increasing its own cyber capabilities by “mainstreaming digital forensic and open source capability”, while also expanding its reach internationally by deploying SOCA Cyber Liaison Officers in key locations overseas, and enhancing the skills of the SOCA International Network.