I'm the Cyber Crime Prevention Officer for Dorset Police, and so my role has been created for about a year and a half now, to get cyber security advice out to as many people as possible around the county, particularly small businesses because they tend not to have the cyber security training and advice in place and if we can help with that knowledge and advice to prevent cybercrimes from happening, we could effectively keep those businesses from being hit by cyber attacks.

So, are we saying that small businesses are particularly susceptible to cyber crime?

What small and medium businesses tend not to have the IT departments that might help them out later and, particularly, don't have a security person who would look after their company in that respect. So, yes everyone's targeted. The small and medium businesses tend not to have that prevention in place.

And presumably Dorset Police saw a need specifically for somebody in your sort of role?

Yes, well all the police forces in the country were offered money by the Home Office to fund this role and I think the large majority of the forces have taken on my role.

Okay, so even if listeners are listening in from another county then effectively they will be able to reach out to their local force.

Yes definitely, someone can go in and give a talk and give some training if they need it.

That’s interesting.

So, what's your background? How did you get into cyber security?

Well, I did Maths and Computing at University, and then I went straight into the Police Force. I started off doing statistics, but then I soon went into the high-tech crime unit. That's the unit where I would take computers apart and look for digital evidence on hard drives and in phones…

That’s the stuff of telly cop shows!

Absolutely! Not as quick as it is on the TV, but with a murder, for example, we're going to take the computer apart and have look for just log on & log off times, Google history, and their emails can be found, anything that could help out as evidence in a court case would be huge, and it's growing so much these days. I did that for about eight years and then I managed the team became Head of Digital Forensics for a couple of years in Dorset Police, and then I was asked to go and join the cyber crime team.

Wow! Challenging!

So I know you're going to talk to us about different types of cyber crime. I had an email supposedly from HMRC. Now it looked really genuine. I'm used to them now, so I did double-check the email address that it came from, because it was telling me that I had a £411 refund. Are those the sort of things that are catching people out?

Yes, that’s a typical phishing email. Phishing emails are a huge problem but they're always prevented by us knowing that they could be a phishing scam. And so the HMRC one… lots and lots of people are discussing them now so they tend to think twice and hope they see them come up. Also, if you do have an HMRC account, you'll have what's called a two-factor authentication in place, which means when you type in your user name and password, it'll then say ‘hey we're going to text you a code’, and that code is one time password that works just for that one minute. And so that means the hacker if he had your password, he would also need that code and he hasn't got your mobile phone. So, that's a big telltale sign if you're going to a site and it doesn't ask you for that code, of course, therefore you're probably looking at fake site like they're trying to harvest your password. They do, however, send fake text messages as well. So, it's not just fake emails that are coming through. It's called SMS phishing or together that's called smishing, that's the newer term. They love these terms!. That will come to your phone it says 'hey!