The European Union needs a special office to fight cybercrime, the bloc's executive said Wednesday, proposing it be set up next year in The Hague offices of Europol, the European police coordination agency, according to dpa. The new office would warn EU national law enforcement authorities of major cybercrime threats and alert them of weaknesses in their online defences, the European Commission said. It is also to focus on online identity theft, credit card and e-banking scams, cyberattacks like those launched by the Anonymous hackers' group and child pornography, the commission added in a statement. EU interior ministers and the European Parliament would need to approve the proposal - but officials said it was not expected to be a controversial issue. The commission quoted a 2011 study by US internet security firm Norton indicating that the global cost of cybercrime was between 114 and 388 billion dollars. In Germany, reported thefts of online banking data - so-called phishing - more than doubled from around 2,000 cases in 2008 to more than 5,000 two years later, while in Britain online breaches of bank accounts increased 207 per cent in 2008-2009, the EU executive said.
