Investigating Cybercrime … Not!

Investigating Cybercrime … Not Quite Yet!

Unfortunately, Cybercrime has one of the best chances of gaining reward, and in not getting caught. In many cases, especially in cryptocurrency investigations, the rewards can be extremely high, and the chances of going to prison is almost zero … the perfect crime!

One of the greatest issues is that front-line police officers are generally not trained to generally cope with the complexity of the information that is used within a cybercrime investigation. And so if you go to a local police office, and report that someone had stolen your Bitcoins, they would probably look at you with a blank stare.

“Where were they, when they were stolen?”, “They weren’t anywhere, they were on the blockchain!”,

“Didn’t you keep them in a safe?”, “No! They don’t exist!”,

“Then how could they be stolen?”, “Someone hacked by private key!”,

“Where did you drop that?”, “I didn’t drop it, it is was in my wallet”,

“Can I see your wallet?”, “It’s on my phone”,

“Can we get fingerprints of your wallet?” … “Oh, it doesn’t matter!”.

For most people, these would seem like sensible questions, and all part of a traditional investigation process. We thus urgently need to training our front-line police officers to understand a new world, and for our legal systems to acknowledge that a new world exists, and that it is not always physical things that get stolen.

And so last week it was reported that over 9,000 cybercrime reports in the UK had not been processed, as a scanner had reported them as malicious and had quaranted them. The site responsible was this one [here]:

It is thought that the bug was introduced within an update on October 2018 of the Know Fraud system. This system then forwards the posts to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), and which never received the quarantined reports.

The discovery was part of an audit, which, apart from the quarantining of the reports, was generally given a good rating for the processes involved in cybercrime investigations, and in the multi-agency work.

Conclusions

As a society we need to reflect on the new ways of doing the same old crime, and we need the resources to disrupt those who commit these crimes. I do feel a bit sorry for front-line officers in the increased need for cybersecurity awareness in law enforcement. Currently, in the UK, there is very little in the way of a budget for large-scale training of front-line police officers in cybersecurity, but still, they are increasingly being asked to investigate cybercrime-related areas. And sometimes, too, you feel there a few gaps that would that would take 10 seconds to fix: