EU needs a ‘cyber cop’ to prevent attacks

Europe needs a "Mr Cyber Security" or "cyber cop" to ensure communications networks are properly protected, as the cost to the EU economy if they were take down for a month could top 150 million.

This was according to EU tech commissioner Viviane Reding, who said she would fight for such a role to be created.

"Europe needs a 'Mr Cyber Security' as we have a 'Mr Foreign Affairs', a security tsar with authority to act immediately if a cyber attack is underway, a cyber cop in charge of the coordination of our forces and of developing tactical plans to improve our level of resilience," she said in a video on her website.

Citing cyber attacks in Estonia, Georgia and Lithuania, she said Europe's networks needed to be protected from attack as well as breakdown.

"The reality of cyber attacks is nowadays quite far from being a game or a proof of intelligence and curiosity. Cyber attacks have become a tool in the hands of organised crime, a means of blackmailing companies and organisations, of exploiting the weakness of people, but also an instrument of foreign and military policy, and globally a challenge to democracy and economy," said Reding.

She called for the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) to be made more powerful, saying the European security agency "remains mainly limited to being a platform to exchange information and is not, in the short term, going to become the European headquarters of defense against cyber attacks."

Click here to read more on how ENISA is defending Europe against cyber attacks.