CyberCrime training in Bahrain

I've just been one among trainers on the "Training Course on Combating CyberCrime", organised by Judicial and Legal Institute, Kingdom of Bahrain in cooperation with GPEN, Global Prosecutors E-Crime Network.  It was very interesting event, very successful and really high above usual, perfect organisation by our hosts, judges, prosecutors, police officers from all Arab gulf states, with immense interest and will to participate, 

Instead of pure "slide & lecture" scenario, it was full interaction, questions, answers, case comments with perfect simultaneous translation,  Language is always problem, not only pure mother tongue to mother tongue, but also more important in our situation technical language to legal language and tradition. 

I'm sure that training gets its purpose, interaction and cooperation among all participants was from start, that was the key goal, basically all definitions and answers were provided by participants, trainers were more moderators and ones who asked hard questions.

The discussion and events makes me think about terms we use and its meaning I think I should write one post on word Cyber which is often used this days

Competition workshop

Recently I was involved in a digital forensic workshop for a competition agency.

It is an interesting issue because a great deal of work in competition enforcement agencies today is related to handling digital evidence. There are a lot of document on the international competition  network site which lively present the state of anti cartel practice. Each anti cartel agency has its own procedures and history but there is one common thing, introduction of digital evidence support. Some agencies are even completely moved to electronic documents while others are handling paper documents or being completely on the paper documentation. The process which leads to digitization and accepting digital evidence is not an easy one, it takes a lot of time and effort, and usually requires thinking about procedures and documentation workflow in the anti cartel agency. Such processes can take a long time and have a lot of mishaps.
I was involved in preparing a  raid simulation as the basic part of the workshop, very nice  operation with a lot of things to learn.  The result of workshop was a set of forms and blueprints which give the full planing capability for the agency. The idea was well tested from disaster recovery and business continuity practices. A simple approach where you create a set of procedures and documents which drive you through the whole event, it also gives a nice opportunity for role play approach and testing scenarios. I hope we did a good thing.
Later on DataFocus2015 Mr. Mislav Kršulović from Croatian Competition Agency did presentation about "Dawn raid in practice", To my great pleasure this state of art example from real life showed our workshop was very close to reality.

Students and Image Forensics

After a long wait, I finally have a candidate from Vsite who is interested in image forensics, a perfect challenge. There are a lot of talks about tools, applications and methods on how to use image forensics in our law enforcement community.

Digital image forensics is a big field running at a very fast pace. Our position is more towards practical application and tools for handling and comparing images rather than basic scientific work. Most of the practical problems in our local community are in the classification and recognition of  images extracted from mobiles devices, computers etc. It boils down to handling hashes and effectively working with a huge number of files. I believe we will have to tackle this part of the situation in order to propose or implement a solution which can automate such tasks. 

We will all have to discuss the possibilities in order to combine the fresh inquisitive mind of the students with the tools and realities of law enforcement, while at the same time getting some practical results.  My idea is to shape a practical part for a graduation thesis into practical tools or systems which have to be used in real life and also to be a proof of concepts for further work and expansion,

I really hope for some nice student work, useful tools and a few published articles.

I'll post about how events will go, can be interesting and inspiring too.