Cyber Crime Task Force Plan

Cyber Crime Task Force Plan Name: Institution: Date: Executive Summary The main priorities for the St. Louis County cyber criminal task force will focus on online fraudulent activities, identity theft, child exploitation and pornography. Online fraud poses huge challenges for both private and public organizations as fraudsters can manipulate information to their advantage. Furthermore, fraud compromises national security and has the potential to affect people beyond the state of Missouri. Identity theft is a growing menace in St. Louis and the world at large posing risk to personal information and leading to fraudulent activities. Despite parent’s best efforts to protect their children from online predators, the issue of child exploitation is still present, and there is a need for concerted efforts among government agencies, intelligence analysts and the community to stop these illegal activities. Introduction For business leaders especially in the financial world, cyber crime presents unique challenges because of increased reliance on technology. On one hand, computer technology has positively changed the work place, but on the other there have been increased cases of cyber crime leading to huge losses for businesses (Mohay et al., 2003). Even though, past cases of cyber crime focused on intellectual property, governments are now more worried on attacks that could compromise national security. Thus, the US Federal government has been in the fore front asking for prosecution of cyber criminals.  In St. Louis County, cyber criminals have the potential to disrupt businesses, public services provision as well as engage in identity theft and this could have negative repercussions for the county. Cyber crime threats in St. Louis County, Missouri In the county, the most likely crime threat is identify threats through cyber criminals; cyber crooks are now infiltrating computer networks to gain access to personal information. Even though, attacks may originate from somewhere else, these attacks compromise computer security and the criminals may trade information on financial matters to defraud residents of the county. With access to personal information, cyber criminals have the ability to sell credit card details across the internet. Dealing with such threats not only requires cooperation of the superintendent of police, but also federal government and Missouri’s State Attorney General. Other than hacking to gain access to personal details, internet scams are now a common threat to the residents of St. Louis Missouri. With increased reliance on computers to check details and gain information, more residents are being exposes to scams through sites such as craigslist (CBS, 2013).Cyber criminals rely on people’s trust and may fool even the most careful people. In one incidence, cyber criminals obtained information and preyed on people seeking rental houses, but upon investigation it was found that the owner of the house did not intend to rent out the property (CBS, 2013). Some of the scams involve infiltrating the email account and stealing personal details, and victims may not know about the scam till it is too late. Another worrying trend in cyber crime is child exploitation after coercion by cyber criminals.  The anonymity of the internet has enabled criminals to coerce teenagers, who are then threatened with dire consequences if they fail to heed the criminal’s demands. This is different from cyber bullying, and even involves sexual exploitation and child trafficking.  Children and teenagers in St Louis County are vulnerable to exploitation as child pornography is increasingly common in the Web.  Even though, many parents have put limits on the online activities of their children, the teenagers may not readily reveal their online activities even when they are targets of exploitation. Cyber Crime Task Force Structure Dealing with cyber crime threats requires collaboration among various agencies this is because cyber crime is becoming more sophisticated, than officials can deal with. The anonymity of the internet makes it hard to deal with these crimes, but through collaboration among the agencies then the officials can unmask the criminals’ identities. Similarly, cyber criminal have the ability to hide their identities and are mostly caught after large- scale operations (Brenner, 2010).The internet is also characterized with communication across various countries and territories, and the task force has only jurisdiction over the St Louis area. Consequently, cyber crime activities may span across various countries, with the criminals able to coordinate their illegal activities from various locations (Brenner, 2010). The structure of the task force will take into account other task forces used to combat cyber crime , and also the organizational structure of these crime units , similar to other large- scale criminals organizations that have a command structure. Thus, to deal with the criminals the task force will include various agencies tasked with coordinating information and presenting their information to a common command center. The task force will mostly rely on researchers to deal with looking for information on illegal online activities, but analysts stationed in the area will then sort out the information depending on high risk cyber crime and moderate cyber crime. There will also be coordination with agencies from Missouri, federal government, local communities, security agencies and other governments. In essence, the structure of the task force will first be tasked with limiting the hacking ability and email infiltration of the cyber criminals. All the stake holders involved in the operation will report their findings on a daily basis. In other words the task force will gather information on the main perpetrators of internet crime, and track their logging details and activities to determine whether they can identify possible targets of attack. In order to ensure that the process is tamper proof, there will be continuous simulation on security details information sent and received from the various stakeholders. This is to avoid infiltration or information compromise from cyber criminals. Furthermore, data security experts will have to ensure that there is adequate encryption of data. The virtual teams chosen to deal with cyber crime will also minimize the impact of botnets which may cause denial of service and cause national security scare (Tiirmaa, 2013). In order to deal with this, all the team members will be regularly updated on the level of threats posed by various forms of cyber crime. This is because cyber criminals are sophisticated and keep changing their tactics and joint enforcement would lower the threat levels. Equally, there will be training on a regular basis with emphasis on internal training and will also include coordinated efforts towards a joint curriculum that focuses on most threatening cyber crime. In accessing the curriculum, all the agencies will the same password, but security analysts will ensure that no one bypasses security checks. Even though, the task force will have coordinated e...