Cybercrime Is A Growing Problem Warns Leeds Professor

Cybercrime is a growing problem - that's what we're hearing from researchers at Leeds Beckett.

They've received a share of £10m in financial backing from the Police Knowledge Fund to help the police tackle crimes like fraud and child sexual exploitation.

The £640,000 project at the university will last 18 months and will try and find solutions to the problems created by more and more people using digital technology.

Colin Pattinson is a Professor there and explains why it's such a problem.

"Child sexual exploitation is often done and carried out through internet services. Anybody who does anything on the internet - whether legal or illegal - leaves a trace. The problem we have is finding the trace that leads is to the criminals through the mass of other information which is just background noise really.

"It can be very dangerous, there can be situations of theft of personal data, of that being used to generate financial loss, you will of heard and read about of a number of attacks on major organisations - major banks, major public services."

But what can we do to protect ourselves? He told us what to look out for:

"E-mail scams - they're still there, they're still live and people still need to watch out for them. but other scams in terms of identity theft, fraud , phishing to gain information, and probably most significantly trojans and things which actually take control of computer systems.

"The internet is really just another place and as in the real world there are good people and bad people, in the real world you learn to avoid the bad people and the bad situations. I think it's having that awareness of not going where you shouldn't in the internet world as well."

Click here for more advice from West Yorkshire Police.