Police CyberAlarm
​What is Police CyberAlarm?
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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.
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Police CyberAlarm will detect and provide regular reports of suspicious cyber activity, enabling your business or What is Police CyberAlarm? organisation to identify and take steps to minimise your vulnerabilities.
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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.
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As a business in the West Midlands Region, you are eligible to sign up for Police CyberAlarm for free.
How does Police CyberAlarm work?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 your firewall/internet gateway, Network Intrusion Detection/Prevention system (IDS/IPS), Network Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam filters.
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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 are the benefits to my business?
Regular Reporting
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Detailing potentially malicious activity discovered on your firewall/internet gateway.
You can use these reports for further investigation and to better protect your business.
Identify your business vulnerabilities
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Scan your businesses website and external IP addresses for known vulnerabilities. These regular reports can help you protect your business from known suspicious activity.
Business information and intelligence
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Data is used to provide details on the latest threats discovered, giving your business the ability to update security measures.
Helping the police help you
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Data is also used by the police to identify current threats, take enforcement action against the cyber criminals and help your business prepare and better protect itself.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Does it collect any personal data?
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​No, the data collected by the system does not contain any content of the traffic. The system is designed to protect personal data, trade secrets and intellectual property.
Where do I sign up?
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​Police CyberAlarm is a police system and all data collected is collected by the police and not The West Midlands Cyber Resilience Centre.