Model example

For the last twelve weeks, parents and grandparents of pupils at a secondary school in Ayr have been going back to school. For up to an hour each week, the 150 first-year pupils at Kyle Academy in South Ayrshire have been learning the specific technical skills necessary to stay safer online. Online personal and computer security, malware and viruses, cyber bullying, wireless security and passwords, social networking safety, encryption and cloud computing, and how to avoid online grooming were all addressed. However, the USP has been what’s been taking place outside the classroom rather than necessarily within it.  

“They had to go home and do questionnaires with their parents and grandparents about how safe their computer was, passwords they were using, do grandparents know how easy it was to get into systems, how secure all the devices were,” says acting headteacher, Lyndsay McRoberts. “Quite often the grandparents or parents had firewalls, etc, on laptops but had nothing on phones or tablets, that type of thing. It was about looking at all electronic devices in the home.” It is this three-generational approach, particularly extending reach to so-called ‘silver surfers’ who are considered to be among those most vulnerable online, that attracted Police Scotland’s attention.

“We need to look at the curriculum changing to make it more focused on what the threats are nowadays, but equally what the opportunities are,” says Detective Superintendent Stevie Wilson, cybercrime lead for the single force. A 2012 report by e-skills UK put the financial benefit to the Scottish economy at £3.7bn over the following five to seven years through optimisation of ICT by businesses. “Now cyber security is only one part of digital but I would argue it is one of the main parts of the foundation of it,” adds Wilson. 

“If you’ve got a cyber secure society, business [and] individuals can thrive. If you don’t have that key foundation, the whole thing could collapse round about you. The key to me for this is we start at primary school. Now you look at many kids at six, seven, eight years old, what do they do? They’re on their tablets, they’re on computers [and] they’re on mobile phones. I grew up in a different age whereby you were playing football or something like that. The kids now, it is second nature to them. At that early stage, if we can actually engage with them to start giving them that basic cyber hygiene, that grows with them throughout their life.”

The hope thereafter is that young people will consider the employment opportunities. One of Police Scotland’s Glasgow-based female digital forensic officers sat down with pupils at Kyle Academy to discuss her work and, in so doing, overturn the stereotype that this is a sector traditionally the preserve of men.  Even if young people reject it as a career, it’s hoped that they will still carry learning forward into other parts of the business world. 

Aside from technical skills within the business sector, questions have resurfaced as to how adroit law enforcement’s ability is in this area given a survey of police intelligence analysts from 48 UK law enforcement organisations published this month found less than a third of key staff had the skills or technology to tackle the threat.

Police Scotland was the first force in the UK to receive university training on how to tackle cybercrime just over a year ago. In return, officers are now lecturing in some universities on what is being witnessed at the front end. It is also among a number of law enforcement agencies across Europe working with Napier University as part of an EU-funded project to develop an advanced training platform for all levels of the police family, whether new officers or specialists.

Acknowledging that small and medium-size enterprises are often more vulnerable and as such, offer a route into the supply chain, this year, the Scottish Business Resilience Centre has taken on interns from universities to help test firms’ defences. Police Scotland, meanwhile, is currently scoping the potential for six-nine month internships to give those who are university-trained a solid grounding in forensic investigation. “The idea of law enforcement tackling this alone is a complete fallacy,” says Wilson, who describes the academic sector as Scotland’s “jewel in the crown”.

At Kyle Academy, the 12-week pilot will now be incorporated into the first-year curriculum, while the school is engaging with Dundee’s University of Abertay, which has been running a highly-respected Masters programme in ethical hacking since 2007. It has been an eye-opener for the kids, says McRoberts. “But it has also been an eye-opener for parents because I think there is sometimes a lack of awareness. We do a lot of work about who young people are speaking to online and that type of thing but we don’t necessarily get into the technical aspects of how easy it is for people… Young people engage with a lot of the big news stories that have been around this area where young people have got into real difficulty and real trouble and that was an eye-opener for parents about how quickly and easily it is and that it wasn’t just a person who was grooming a child, you’re [also] talking about gangs, you’re talking about organised crime. That kind of thing was an eye-opener to parents, very much so.” 

Police Scotland now plans to review the initiative with a view to rolling it out as a national programme. “For my side of things, we can do as much as we can at the top level in businesses [but] where the big gain for us in Scotland is, is with the schools and into the academic sector,” adds Wilson. “If we can develop what we already have in Scotland from this, we’ve got the chance to become a real market leading country in relation to this.”