The Ministry of the Interior has just finalized its internal reorganization in the fight against cybercrime, with several texts which have just been published in the Official Journal in recent days. With this reform, Place Beauvau acquires a service with national competence and gives a facelift to the services specialized in the police and the gendarmerie.
Either the culmination of an old internal project, which dates back to the white paper on internal security… published in November 2020. This text already recommended the creation of a cyber service with national competence, attached to the gendarmerie. Three years later, it is now done with this decree creating the command of the Ministry of the Interior in cyberspace.
Coordination
Concretely, this new service, called Comcyber-MI, replaces the former Comcybergend of the gendarmes, launched in 2021. The structure should make it possible to better coordinate the resources of the Ministry of the Interior. She “will be in charge of ministerial strategy, threat analysis, training and awareness-raising actions and operational support through the support of personnel with high technical expertise and judicial competence”, specified a parliamentary report.
The Comcyber-MI will also have to produce a report on the cyber threat every year. A type of document which began to be published at the end of the 2010s by a delegation from Place Beauvau, with a final edition in 2019.
Consequence of the creation of this coordination service at ministerial level: the police and gendarmerie have also reviewed their organization. On the police side, an anti-cybercrime office has just been created. It will merge the sub-directorate for the fight against cybersecurity and the former central cyber office with the endless acronym, the Central Office for the Fight against Crime Linked to Information and Communication Technologies (OCLCTIC).
High level
This structure, shared with the gendarmes, customs officers and internal intelligence, is a response “to the development of high-level cybercrime”, indicates the creation decree.
It must be “the true cornerstone of the national system for combating cybercrime” by allowing “simplification, better readability and increased overall efficiency in its role of operational animation and coordination at the national and international level”, reported on Linkedin Nicolas Guidoux, the current deputy director of the fight against cybercrime in the police.
The gendarmerie has finally set up a national cyber unit, attached to its operations and employment department. Or the new name of a well-known service, the Center for the Fight against Digital Crime (C3N), until now attached to ComcyberGend. The national cyber unit will be responsible for judicial investigations, but also for awareness-raising and prevention. So many structures which must now prove that they can work together.