An interactive session with LEA Officials on Cyber Crime

As part of Internet Society Kolkata Chapter ongoing outreach activities we involve with different stakeholders for awareness, advisory and technical support. The lecture is part of the courses organized by Central Detective Training School, Kolkata for different LEA officials on Cyber Crime. The topic of lecture was ‘Investigation of Internet Fraud and Case Studies’ held on 11-02-2015. Investigation of Internet fraud being a vast domain, we have covered it from general awareness point of discussion to very specific cases which can be bottom line in solving many similar nature of cases. From the discussion it was evident that the majority of incidents are happening due to lack of awareness among users about the secured uses of Internet Online Services, Credit Cards etc.

LEA agencies are facing problem in reaching cyber criminal’s machines or point of operations due to the use of anonymous proxies and other tools available in market. The situation is becoming more alarming when the next evolution IoT (Internet of Things) is knocking the doors. This lack of general awareness in one hand and lighting speed adoption of Internet and its services on the other hand is creating a scary situation and LEA officials are having tough time responding to new age crime situations.

The session was interactive and we discussed basic security principals and protocols like https, digital signatures, and encryption methodologies and even practiced some probing techniques. We went ahead to understand how internet works. An insight into BGP routers behind Internet backbone by using some publicly accessible BGP Looking Glasses.

The concerns and suggestions from the session are as follows:

1. Lack of awareness about secured uses of online services among users are reasons of majority of incidents.
2. Online services like e-commerce, e-payments should maintain proper use activity logs and respond to the lawful investigation of fraudulent activities.
3. Continuous training of all the stakeholders in cyber-crime investigation life cycle.