DigForCE: DIGITAL FORENSICS FOR CYBER ENFORCEMENT AT DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY WORKING TOWARDS PUBLIC-PRIVATE CYBERCRIME INVESTIGATIONS.
Date | 22 September 2020 |
Author | Podhradsky, Ashley |
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INTRODUCTION
Cyber and digital forensics investigations are core components of the cybersecurity field [1]. It is rare to have a day where the media isn't discussing the latest hack, breach or insider threat. In fact, the media is flooded with high-profile cybercrimes detailing how cybercriminals are acclimatizing and evolving their skills to breaching systems, exploiting ransomware, and phishing attacks on individuals, institutions, states, and consumer products. These attacks are associated with vast amounts of digital forensic evidence. The evidence associated with most of these cyber crimes is retrieved from laptops, portable electronics (ipads or tablets), mobile phones, hard disk drives, video footage, external data storage devices, as well as cloud-based evidence.
The total cost incurred from cybercrimes is estimated to top $6 trillion by 2021 [2 - 5]. While the total cost is staggering, most of the cases and investigations are at the local and state level. Federal agencies typically investigate high-profile cases along with cases of high dollar amounts. Due to this, local and regional law enforcement agencies are left with the heavy burden of investigating these cases and are struggling to meet the demand for cybercrime investigations. The core challenges for local and regional law enforcement are: training on digital evidence identification and acquisition; maintain evidence integrity; subject matter expertise; and limited time resources.
The need for finding solutions to mitigate the problem is essential, hence, the call for law enforcement collaborating or partnering with private and academic institutions to establish task forces to help combat cybercrime.
This paper works to demonstrate the need for a public-private cybercrime task force and will introduce DigForCE as a new task force partnership. A literature review on existing leading task forces that collaborate with universities will be highlighted. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses related works on public-private taskforcc collaboration around the country as well as forensic investigations conducted in the setup labs. Section 3 introduces DigForCE: it's design, structure, funding, and contribution will be discussed. Section 4 highlights opportunities and challenges facing the establishment and growth of a new entity, followed by Section 5, which concludes with future research and DigForCE direction.
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LITERATURE REVIEW
This section briefly reviews leading past and present taskforce partnerships and the specific roles these partnerships play in contributing to investigating cybercrimes.
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PARTNERSHIPS
Law enforcement entities have a long history of partnering with universities to perform scientific research and applied forensic science investigations. Oglebay Hall Laboratories at West Virginia University focuses on forensic chemistry, latent fingerprints, DNA, trace evidence, document analysis, and four microscopies. In addition to Oglebay Hall, WVU has the Crime Scene Training Complex which is utilized by many law enforcement agencies. The complex has a unique crime scene house, a vehicle processing garage, ballistic test center, and other dedicated space for fieldwork scenarios. This lab provides law enforcement officers with continuing education and advanced training (West Virginia University, 2019). At the University of Albany, the Northeast Regional Forensic Institute ("NERFI") created a curriculum to train law enforcement and educate the current student in the area of DNA [ap 1].
At Irvine University College, there is a partnership program designed specifically to collaborate with Law Enforcement. The program acknowledges the importance of contributions performed by individuals who are in Law Enforcement to the public for the greater good. The University records both current and past students from several Attorney General's Office, Probation Departments as well as both state and local agencies [6]. Similarly, the University of Rhode Island Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center ("DFCSC") was established with a grant obtained from the National Science Foundation in 2004. The DFCSC not only offers one of the most comprehensive graduate and undergraduate level degree programs in digital forensics, but also...
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