For Superintendent Patrick Lam of the Technology Crime Division (TCD), the Force's Vision Statement of ensuring that Hong Kong remains one of the safest and most stable cities in the world, covers both physical and cyber dimensions.

In ensuring cyber security for the ITU Telecom World 2006, which was held from December 4 to 8 December, the importance of partnership with the industry and academia could not be over-stressed. SP Lam pointed out that many technology crimes are borderless and time-critical, and criminals are "creative" so they can exploit the power and convenience of Internet technologies to the detriment of society.

"On the one hand, it is very important for the Hong Kong Police Force to impress upon all stakeholders the need to take precautionary measures, including reviewing their incident response plans and hardening their information systems. On the other hand, not only must the international law enforcement communities work together but the industry should also be actively involved," SP Lam stated this during a recent e-fraud seminar organised by the Force to raise the IT security awareness of the e-banking industry in Hong Kong.

Experts from the HKCert and Microsoft were keynote speakers at the seminar, and their presentations were enlightening and informative for both the Force and the e-banking industry to stay ahead of the criminals.

To live up to the CP's three-year Strategic Action Plan on "prevention and detection of cyber attacks against major information systems" and to counter the threat of BotNets, the Force remains one of the most active and supportive members of the International BotNet Task Force since its inception in 2005.

A BotNet is a large number of compromised computers that are used to create denial of service attacks or send spam. The computer is compromised via a Trojan and waits for commands from the person in control of the BotNet.

"The knowledge and experience gained from the Task Force are instrumental in ensuring cyber security in Hong Kong, in particular during the major events of the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference in 2005 and the ITU Telecom World in 2006," said SP Lam when he expressed his gratitude to Microsoft for their initiative to help set up the International BotNet Task Force which facilitates information sharing and provision of state-of-the-art training to counter the threat of BotNets.

In fact, in the past 12 months, based on the good collaboration between the Force and Microsoft, hundreds of BotNet Controllers in Hong Kong have been eradicated, making the Force one of the most advanced law enforcement agencies in the world to deal with the problem of BotNets.

Chief Inspector Paul Jackson of Forensics Section, TCD added: "The Force has a family of technology crime training programmes to enable Force members to fight technology crime effectively and efficiently. I'm grateful that top-notch Microsoft trainers have come to Hong Kong to share their invaluable expertise and experience in prevention and detection of technology crimes. I'm certainly looking forward to more opportunities for cooperation in the future."

Apart from technology crime training, CIP Jackson has been busy in evaluating and selecting an array of computer forensics tools to enhance the Force's computer forensics capability.

He noted:"We worked closely with the University of Hong Kong in the past in the development of DESK (Digital Evidence Search Kit) and we are presently evaluating a new cutting edge forensics tool introduced by Microsoft to the law enforcement agencies during the 8th Meeting of the Interpol Asia-South Pacific Working Party on I.T. Crime which was hosted by Hong Kong and held in Arsenal House from December 19 to 21."