26. July 2011 · Comments Off on Crowd Sourcing Cyber Investigations: Untapped Potential or Risky Business? | SecurityWeek.Com · Categories: blog · Tags: ,

Crowd Sourcing Cyber Investigations: Untapped Potential or Risky Business? | SecurityWeek.Com.

For many years law enforcement turned to the public for aid in identifying and tracking criminal suspects. This was done through famous WANTED posters and, later as technology progressed, featuring them in television shows such as “America’s Most Wanted”. If we put it in today’s terms, law enforcement use crowd sourcing in criminal investigations and manhunts, receiving leads of the criminal’s identity and whereabouts from the public when such leads were not obtained through the normal course of the investigation. Surprisingly, in the world where some individuals from the public have as much knowledge and resources at their disposal than the law enforcement investigators, crowd sourcing isn’t done enough. I’m talking, of course, about the world of cybercrime.

The article goes on to describe a couple of situations where crowd sourcing of cyber investigations played a role in apprehending the perpetrator.

Could crowd sourcing cyber investigations be done in a more organized way?