Combating cyber crime not child’s play
by Ernie Davitt, National Affairs Editor, ASM
No-one would say that combating cyber crime is child’s play, but the Australian Federal Police have enlisted help from children as part of a creative new arsenal to help them hunt down online criminals.
Because of the growing cost and incidence of online crime, Australia’s national law enforcement body is being forced to adopt more and more innovative ways of trying to keep one step ahead of criminals.
At a time when the AFP has been subject of criticism on a number of fronts, including over its investigation and prosecution of terrorism suspects, I believe the national law enforcement body deserves high praise for its world-leading approach.
Other measures to counter cyber crime include:
- police officers on the e-beat, ‘patrolling’ the internet;
- detectives working with bank staff in high-tech crime teams;
- the outposting of a senior AFP officer to Microsoft in the US for a year to study cyber developments; and
- even setting up virtual online police stations in partnership with the FBI.
An insight into the groundbreaking steps police are taking was given by AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty when he addressed the Australian Institute of Company Directors in Adelaide earlier this year.
He told his audience that the incidence of online fraud in Australia had risen by nearly 60 per cent in the past year alone.
“In May 2008 the Australian Payments Clearing Association released figures which indicated the number of fraudulent internet payments, known as Card-Not-Present Transactions, grew from 112,000 to 190,000 for the 12 months to 31 December last year,” Mr Keelty said.
“And they’re for cards issued in Australia. And that represents a climb of nearly 60 per cent, from $31.7 million last year – at the beginning of last year – to $53.4 million by the end of the year.
“And phishing, which is the process of fraudulently attempting to obtain personal information about someone, such as their username, their passwords or their credit card details, it’s becoming far more prevalent.
“Last year phishing attacks in the US rose significantly, with losses of $3.2 billion recorded to US agencies. And in the 12 months ending August 2007, 3.6 million adults in the US lost money through phishing attacks, compared with 2.3 million the previous year.”
Mr Keelty said Australia’s figures were not easy to obtain, but police believed they were, at least at the pro rata level, if not, exceeding the experience in the US, mainly because of the higher take-up rate of technology here.
He referred to the Beijing Olympics ticket scam where people around the world paid for non-existent tickets on a bogus website.
“One of the things that we’ve done in the AFP through the Australian High Tech Crime Centre, that all of the States and Territory police provide assistance to and resources to, is to partner very early in the piece with business,” he said.
Mr Keelty said police had been able to shut down some false websites and denial of service attacks very quickly, through the cooperation of banks and the private sector.
He referred to the vulnerability of children to new mobile phone technology and said parents needed to be aware of what kids were doing online.
“Most of us don’t conceive the mobile phone to be a computer, but in fact it is, particularly with the 3G technology,” he said.
“One of the things we’ve done in the AFP is, we’ve actually brought on children to help us. We’ve got a young person attached to our high-tech crime area, and earlier this year, at the beginning of the year, we put together a number of schools.
“We did it as a sample in Canberra. We put 20 schools together and we listened to kids telling us how they do the things they do online and what are the most attractive things that they do.
“In fact we asked the kids, ‘How would it be, in your mind, that we should police the Internet with you?’ And they gave us quite a few ideas.
“That translated to, about four weeks ago we sent 10 children to London, from years 9 to years 12, to be part of a group of 150 young people from around the world. And we’re moving towards October this year, where we want to put a submission to the United Nations on how to protect children online.
“And the best way to do that of course, in our eyes, was to actually engage the children in telling us what’s attractive and what’s not, online. And I’ve got to tell you, it’s turned the minds of our investigators around completely 180 degrees because they were going down a traditional investigation and a traditional path of how they police in the streets or in the community, to a new way of doing business online.”
Mr Keelty said the AFP was working with the FBI to open up a police station in the free 3D online virtual world Second Life, ‘so that when kids get into trouble or people get defrauded, they can come to the virtual police station and we can start dealing with the issue.’
The full transcript of Mr Keelty speech is available at:
http://www.afp.gov.au/media/national_media/national_speeches/2008/address_to_institute_of_company_directors