I recently represented APNIC at INTERPOL’s 3rd Eurasian Working Group on Cybercrime for Heads of Units, held in Xiamen, China, 23-25 September 2015.
This is the second time APNIC has been invited to attend the meeting, joining heads of law enforcement units from Europe, Asia and Oceania, as well as other key Internet partners to discuss trends in cybercrime and work towards developing a coordinated law enforcement response.
Some 100 participants from 27 member countries, eight private sector companies and Europol attended the meeting co-hosted by the Ministry of Public Security of China.
In addition to sharing expertise and best practice in cybercrime investigations, the three-day meeting provided an opportunity to develop regional action plans and identify potential areas for operational activity to target cybercriminals.
Addressing cybercrime challenges
Many cybercrimes involve multiple actors across multiple jurisdictions. The current formal process for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to collect evidence from another jurisdiction – Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty – is slow, which compromises investigations and prosecutions.
Collaboration between LEAs regionally and internationally helps speed up this cross-jurisdictional information sharing process. Working groups like these provide all partners involved with an opportunity to establish and strengthen relationships.
Another important component in the fight against cybercrime is engaging with service providers (such as domain names registrars and web content hosting companies) and encouraging them to include in their terms and conditions the proviso that illegal use of their service will lead to content being taken down, reported and shared with LEAs.
Collaborating with LEAs
APNIC engages with LEAs in the Asia Pacific region on matters relating to Internet security issues to help make the Internet a more stable, secure, and open platform.
During the meeting I gave a presentation about how we work with various LEAs to help them better understand how the Internet registry system operates and what useful publicly available information can be found in the APNIC Whois Database.
We are very grateful that the law enforcement community embraces us as part of their community in fighting cybercrime and we wholeheartedly welcome the law enforcement community to participate in our policy development process as well, to make sure the voices campaigning for a safer and secure Internet are heard and addressed.
The next INTERPOL working group meeting will be held in Seoul, Korea, in conjunction with the International Symposium on Cybercrime Response, organized by the Korea National Police Agency.
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