The Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT) is working on building an encryption system to better enable sharing of threat information.
Speaking at the ISSE Conference in Brussels, Troels Oerting, head of the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), said that more of a dialogue is needed, and efforts are being made to build an encryption system to encrypt and minimise what data is shared.
Oerting told IT Security Guru that this is an algorithm it is building itself, and he acknowledged that it will be a “most heavily scrutinised system” to allow companies to trust the J-CAT. He explained that only valuable data is wanted, and J-CAT only requests intelligence that has “true meaning” and it crosses, matches and identifies data subjects. He said: “We don’t want small ones, the rest you can keep!”
Oerting said that current information gathering is done through national police units, and it is received in a cluster and all passes through the unit. What J-CAT offers is a joined up and borderless crime intelligence unit to battle the similarly borderless cyber criminal effort. He said that the ten national members said that they needed platform and need room where it can work all the time with a secure VPN.
He said: “We have ten countries, 11 from next month when Canada joins, and each has 15 cyber experts. We have to identify and find areas to identify to go up against the big crooks and I hope this will be a permanent task force.
“We identify threat vectors, prioritise targets, coordinate, strategise and takedown. We take investigations into high tech crime and look at intrusions and facilitation, look at malware, botnets and intrusions and identify those who made a lasting impact.”
Echoing comments made last week to the BBC, Oerting said that “there are not so many so we have a good idea of who they are and those are all primary targets.”
Oerting said that current levels of crime “breaks the necks” of small businesses as they are the only guys who sold commodities and lose whole business, and this was why it was taking cyber crime so seriously. “It is not an easy crime to solve and goes under the radar and we keep an eye on it,” he said.
“We should do more on prevention and protection. The police do it online to a lower degree and it is in the interest of all of us and I am confident that the police can still have an impact.”
He concluded by saying that he was very optimistic about the potential of J-CAT, and called it a great opportunity and he was grateful for the UK leadership with it. “We need to be open on what we learn
and cannot do so we have to find a balance or we will have a time when we lose our grip with what is going on,” he said.
