Victims of cyber crime can now call on help from an AI chatbot as well as experienced cyber crime agents, thanks to

The Cyber Helpline

, the first nationwide cyber crime support service. The Cyber Helpline is a free, confidential helpline for individuals who have been victims of cyber crime. It has been able to scale to support nationwide enquiries by deploying confidential chatbot technology from leading UK AI and chatbot agency

GreenShoot Labs

. The Cyber Helpline, a Not For Profit company, helps individuals contain, recover and learn from cyber attacks by connecting them with a cyber security chatbot and volunteer experts who provide relevant advice and guidance, at any time, day or night.

“There are so many people, old and young, who are targeted by sophisticated cyber criminals, subjecting them to undue stress, but who don’t have the finances nor know where to go in these situations,”

said Rory Innes, CEO The Cyber Helpline.

“The Cyber Helpline has been launched to give victims a place to go for experienced advice from cyber security volunteers."

“In order to scale we needed a solution that would help us support the rising level of crime nationwide, whilst ensuring personal confidentiality,”

added Innes.

“Working with our cyber security volunteers, GreenShoot Labs built us the answer via chatbots which can navigate the complex world of cyber crime but also help victims contain threats and recover.”

The GreenShoot Labs-developed chatbot gathers details from the individual victims of the cyber crimes, allowing them to explain in their own language what has happened. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning is then used to interpret, categorise and diagnose the attack. Working with cyber security experts, GreenShoot Labs trains and improves the platforms accuracy over time.

“We could completely understand the need to increase the support available to victims of cybercrime and worked together with the team to develop a fully scalable chatbot solution,”

said Tim Deeson, CEO of GreenShoot Labs.

“The first thing we needed to understand is how people report and describe these crimes; we wanted to make a system that allowed people to provide as much detail as possible in the most natural way, whilst ensuring privacy as the utmost priority. Only if a user decides to ask the chatbot to introduce them to a volunteer cyber security expert for further help it will ask for a first name, phone number and email address to help solve the issue.”

“We are delighted with the results from the initial public release. Around 80% of our enquiries are now being successfully handled by the chatbot allowing the remaining 20% of more complex cases to be handled by our cyber security experts – it’s a way higher proportion than we initially envisaged,”

added Innes.

“For a Not For Profit, the optimisation of resources, combined with improved support of a critical service, really validated our decision to innovate with support automation.”