The EUobserver reports on the testimony of Troels Oerting, the incoming head of the European Union’s new Cyber Crime Center (EC3), which is a part of the European Union’s joint police body Europol, and will become operational on January 1, 2013. Testifying before Members of the European Parliament at a hearing in Brussels on September 17, Oerting said, “There is no absolute security, it is a myth.” Oerting also “noted that the anonymity of online crime is a major problem.”

Talking to the issue of explosion in the number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which now stands somewhere in the region of 3.4 billion, Oerting said that soon there will be billions more IP addresses making the job on the part of the police looking into cyber crime activities even more difficult. “He added that more than 200 billion spam e-mails are being sent every day and that 46 new malicious codes aimed to steal online data are being created every second.” In Oerting’s view, “the way forward is to create better legal norms and public awareness and to ensure that what is illegal in the 'offline world' is also illegal in the online one.”