As a member, Police CyberAlarm is a free tool to help you understand and monitor malicious cyber activity against your network. This service is made up of two parts: monitoring and vulnerability scanning.

Police CyberAlarm will detect and provide regular reports of suspicious cyber activity, enabling your business or organisation to identify and take steps to minimise your vulnerabilities.

The data collected by the system only contains summary information (meta data and header information) about communications your business or organisation receives from the internet. The system is designed to protect personal data, trade secrets and intellectual property.

Once you become a Police CyberAlarm member you install a virtual or physical ‘Police CyberAlarm Collector’ on your network, which will be used to collect and process traffic logs to enable the identification of suspicious and malicious activity from any of your firewall/internet gateway, Network Intrusion Detection/Prevention system (IDS/IPS), Network Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam filters.

Police CyberAlarm is a monitoring system and does not interfere with normal network operations. There are two ways to install the data collector, and both are easy to do.

What information does Police CyberAlarm collect and how is it used once collected?

The Police CyberAlarm Data Collector installed on your site first identifies suspicious data and by doing so automatically filters out any internal traffic and data from known trusted sources. The remaining data is then encrypted and transmitted to the Police CyberAlarm servers where it is collated, verified, analysed and shared between police forces allowing them to identify new trends, patterns, and cyber-attacks. It is also then possible to identify whether there are repeated trends or patterns on particular services, products, or devices. This information can be used to inform advice and guidance to member organisations and others, as well as to enable the police to take enforcement action.

Each member organisation will benefit from their own report which will include the identification of the new trends and attacks allowing them to better defend themselves against such attacks.

Who can use Police CyberAlarm?

To register to become a Member of Police CyberAlarm you will require the following.

• A standalone firewall
• An Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Number
• Be responsible for the data which you are sharing
• Have a virtual or physical machine with 2GB RAM 2CPU Cores and 25GB HDD