Police CyberAlarm

The EN Digital team are happy to offer free advice on Police CyberAlarm.

A Cyber Security Breaches survey (2022) conducted by the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) found 41% of primary schools and 70% of secondary schools surveyed had identified cyber breaches or atacks during 2021-2022. Secondary schools saw a significant increase in identified breaches in attacks in 2022 over 2021 with 70% reporting breaches in 2022 compared to 58% in 2021.

Schools hold a substantial amount of personal, and often sensitive, data on their staff, pupils and their families. They may also hold information on behalf of volunteers, contractors and other partners.

What is Police CyberAlarm?

Police CyberAlarm is a 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 school 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 school receives from the internet. The system is designed to protect personal data, trade secrets and intellectual property.

The EN Digital team will assist with signing up to Police CyberAlarm and 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.

Police CyberAlarm is a monitoring system and does not interfere with normal network operations.

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 school 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.

For free advice on Police CyberAlarm, please place an order on The Hub at £0 and the EN Digital team will be in touch.