A scheme aimed at helping businesses fight cybercrimes is set to be expanded this year.

Police will partner with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data to relaunch the "Bughunting" campaign that was first introduced in 2023 to help firms identify underlying cybersecurity problems. It also provides free tests to participating enterprises to identify cybersecurity loopholes.

Sixty companies joined the campaign last year and 197 security loopholes were identified, with 10 percent of them of severe level and around 40 percent of high risk.

This year, the number of participating firms is expected to top 200.

"We believe most corporates will not have much resources to take on cybersecurity work as they have other business to take care of, therefore we hope to use resources to help corporates to deal with their cybersecurity problems," said Baron Chan, superintendent of the police Cyber Security Division.

One of the tasks for the authorities is to collect intelligence.

"We have been collecting intelligence from other sources to understand the overall cyber-threat landscape. In the first quarter of this year, we analysed over 2.8 million pieces of cybersecurity threat, of which 18,758 were related to attacks against Hong Kong," said Raymond Lam, chief superintendent of the Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau, adding that 46 percent were related to phishing and 30 percent linked to malware.

In the first four months of this year, the number of tech-related cases stood at 10,113 – a figure similar to last year's – involving HK$1.86 billion.

Police said while most of the culprits were from overseas, officers will also keep an eye out for local hacker groups.