UK Police Service WARP (PolWARP)

With the police service forming part of the Critical National Infrastructure it is vital that the network infrastructure of the police service is robust.

polWARP has been set up to provide the UK police service with a central point of focus for the protection of its national and local infrastructure. The WARP is supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers in England and Wales and Scotland.

The polWARP provides central advice and guidance on information assurance, incident reporting, and security alerts by building upon existing arrangements provided by staff from the Police IT Organisation. It will encourage the sharing of lessons learnt from security incidents and continue to make valuable use of the high degree of expertise already in place in the police service security and network community.

It is not a public facing facility and the WARP will be utilising the secure police extranet known as the CJX (Criminal Justice Extranet) to provide its warning and alerting services. A secure police service facing 'polWARP website' has been set up. There will be an FAQ section, access to NISCC bulletins and publications, UNIRAS information, HMG and CESG documents and security incident information to name a few. The PolWARP intends to make use of the FWA software when available.

Using a capability set up by its national network suppliers, Cable and Wireless, polWARP can broadcast messages to specific addresses in all forces and agencies to notify forces of any incident that may affect them. This facility is inward facing and cannot be accessed from the internet.

PolWARP will be using the facilities of the police portal which can provide sms alerts when normal e mail broadcasts may not be fast enough to match the severity of the incident.

polWARP is now functioning and the services to support it are in place.

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