UK Police Went on a Cybercrime Arrest Spree This Week

Through a multi-agency effort, UK law enforcement made a spree of arrests this week, in what the National Crime Agency (NCA) is calli​ng a "cyber crime strike week."

In all, 57 people were arrested between 2-6 March, charged with a plethora of computer related crimes, such as DDoS attacks, malware distribution, and theft of intellectual property. The largest operation busted 25 people in London and Essex, who are suspected of fraud and money laundering, accord​ing to the BBC.

Overseen by the NCA—essentially the UK's FBI—the operations took place through England, Scotland, and Wales, and included officers from London's Metropolitan Police, local Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs), and the NCA's own National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU).

The NCA and NCCU were launche​d about 18 months ago after the dismantling of the Serious Organised Crime Unit, a unit "plagued with bureaucracy" and other problems, reported The​ Telegraph.

Some of the arrests particularly stick out. A 23-year old man was arrested suspected of hacking the US Department of Defense in June 2014, according to an NCA pre​ss release. In that hack, contact information for some 800 people was stolen, as well as the 34,400 IMEI numbers, which can uniquely identifying mobile devices.

A suspected member of Lizard Squad was also arrested, as well as a 21-year-old man suspected of being part of the D33Ds hacking group. The latter group is believed to be behind the 2012 hack of Yahoo! Voices, which saw the ​theft of over 450,000 passwords.

The BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan​-Jones wrote that he was present at one of the arrests. "One group had tracked the suspect, a 21-year-old student, all the way back from university 40 minutes away," he wrote.

Upon arriving, the officers found one desktop computer and one laptop, both up and running. One officer's job was to make sure that the laptop didn't go into sleep mode, Cellan-Jones wrote, presumably to avoid the chance of a password lock coming into effect.

Cellan-Jones told me on Tw​itter that he had been invited by the NCA to cover the raid.

Although these 57 people were all arrested within the same week, the arrests came from 25 separate operations, according to the NCA pre​ss release. So why carry out the operation in this style? Why announce all of the arrests simultaneously?

"These are operations that were at a point where arrests could be made on them," a National Crime Agency spokesperson told me. However, "part of the brief [of the NCA] is to help the whole of UK law enforcement to step up their response to cybercrime."

While the NCA and its cybercrime unit carry out their own investigations, they are also tasked with coordinating nationwide operations with more local agencies, as well as improving their cybercrime fighting ability overall. "One way to test that is through surge activity like this," the spokesperson added.

There is also a psychological reason for busting dozens of people at once. "That's certainly a part of it" the spokesperson added.

There's a preventative aspect too. "Part of our work is to […] make people think twice about getting involved in this sort of thing."

This approach of arresting people from different investigations in a short time period has some similarities to a previous operation known as "Operation Onymous." In November 2014, FBI, Europol and other law enforcement agencies took down a slew of sites hosted on the deep web, including the second iteration of the Silk Road drug marketplace.

However, it's worth pointing out that of those 414 domains, research​ers revealed that many were fake or clone sites had been shut down in the process. The total figure of seized sites was later updated to just 27.

Whether it's to send a strong message, or test out an agency's ability to coordinate nationwide arrests, there appears to be a trend in pooling together investigations and busting as many people as possible at once. "It's not just a cyber thing; we do that across a number of other things," the NCA spokesperson added.