The Commission's proposal still needs to be adopted by the budgetary authority of Europol, the European Police Office in The Hague, with the aim to establish the Centre to be the European focal point in fighting cybercrime. Once approved, it will mainly focus on illegal online activities carried out by organised crime groups.

The Commission has proposed to create a European Cybercrime Centre within the European Police Office, Europol. Among its objectives, in addition to fight against illegal online activities carried out by organised crime groups, it will also work on preventing cybercrimes affecting e-banking and online booking activities. A focus of the European Cybercrime Centre will be to protect social network profiles from e-crime infiltration, and to focus on cybercrimes which cause serious harm to their victims, such as online child sexual exploitation and cyber-attacks affecting critical infrastructure and information systems in the Union. It is expected that the operations start in January of next year.

The Centre's actions will include to warn EU Member States of major cybercrime threats and alert them of weaknesses in their online defences. Furthermore, it will provide operational support in concrete investigations, be it with forensic assistance or by helping to set up cybercrime Joint Investigation Teams. The Civil Liberties Committee backed also this month the draft law which proposes to punish by at least two years in prison the cyber attacks on IT systems.

On the other hand, the Centre will fuse information from open sources, private industry, police and academia in order to achieve its tasks. The new Centre will also serve as a knowledge base for national police in the Member States and it will pool European cybercrime expertise and training efforts. It will be able to respond to queries from cybercrime investigators, prosecutors and judges as well as the private sector on specific technical and forensic issues. The Centre will also serve as a platform for European cybercrime investigators, where they can have a collective voice in discussions with the IT industry, other private sector companies, the research community, users' associations and civil society organisations.