How do you deal with cyber crime as a police officer? Well, a panel of law enforcement officials and private investigation experts today (Thursday) described their approaches on the stage of Cybertech Global 2020 in Tel Aviv. Among the common actions they take against cyber criminals is analytics of various factors such as email and IP addresses, as well as cooperation between law enforcement bodies. Monitoring the dark web also plays an important role.
New platforms bring about new needs; after a Bitcoin exchange was hacked in Israel, the police had to find tools to investigate this new type of crime. Encrypted date can make things difficult for investigators. There’s metadata, but actual content isn’t available – and it’s not always possible to find the metadata’s sources.
Even if you can find the source, law enforcement in a democracy has to do it legally – a challenge in itself. The Spanish representative on the dais spoke of the problems that arise when information about a case is leaked to the press. If this happens, an already tricky investigation can become even more difficult.
A representative of Cobwebs, a cybersecurity company, told the story of an investigation regarding stolen Bitcoin. The money went through several exchanges. Tech tools were needed to make progress in the investigation. Investigating this kind of case manually is practically impossible. Another aspect of these cases is the conjunction of the physical and virtual: If two random cars are seen together many times in the same month, then physical acts can be translated to virtual data – which then helps solve a case in the physical world.
The courts also play a role in cyber crime cases. These can be somewhat esoteric, and so the judges sometimes simply don’t understand what the actual crime is. The Cybertech panel’s participants said the knowledge they gain needs to be taught to legal officials as well. Another difficulty facing law enforcement is encryption from within – if an employee encrypts an important file and leaves the organization, there may great difficulty getting inside it. The panel also discussed IoT-related crime, with its members stating that the field is not yet well-regulated, and thus IoT targets can often be unprotected.
Global cybercrime is a wide-ranging problem. The panel’s participants agreed that international cooperation was needed, and that combating digital lawbreaking is, of course, very different from traditional crime fighting.
