F-Secure Calls For "Internetpol" To Fight Crimeware

KingofGnG points out F-Secure's Q3 2008 security summary, in which its Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen proposes establishing an "Internetpol," an international organization empowered to target and root out cybercrime anywhere in the world. Hypponen gives examples of why such a supernational force is needed — and these are not hard to find — but provides few details about how such an outfit could get started or how it would work. He does mention the wrinkle that in some countries malware writing, cracking, spamming, and phishing are not illegal or not prosecuted. Is an Internetpol even possible, let alone practical?

Comments

What kind of crime would it fight?

[calmofthestorm]

I can see some use for this, but I fear like most things it would go after political dissidents and copyright infringers rather than actual criminals. Generally speaking I don't want the government to have /more/ power.

Re:What kind of crime would it fight?

[Rennt]

Whats wrong with simply using Interpol to fight cyber crime? As I understand it Interpol is mostly a co-ordination and information sharing organization used by local police forces to tackle crimes that exceed national boarders. Isn't that exactly what is needed?

Come to think of it, Interpol IS used to target these kinds of crime if all governments involved thinks it is evil. Online child porn for example - and from what we hear on the news, this is kind of successful, with arrests and convictions internationally, so whats the problem?

Perhaps the intention is to target "crimes" in a country where it isn't a crime, and the local government is not very sympathetic. An "international organization empowered to target and root out cybercrime" could well shut down Pirate Bay for example.

Re:What kind of crime would it fight?

[GrpA]

I share the feeling, but I'm sick and tired of receiving all the attempts to socially engineer their way into my bank account or similar, or get me to click on some malware, and no matter how obvious these things are, sooner or later they work ( How often have you clicked on "yes" instead of "no" just to make the stupid window go away, or had a poppup pop up just under where you're about to click?)

They don't need an internetpol - they just need the police.

The problem is that the police don't like dealing with it. It's too hard to understand and they don't get paid enough and they have to deal with stupid paperwork anyway because some kid got caught painting logos on someone's wall, and now some idiot computer user is calling saying "My bank account is being hacked, help me" and the poor cop can't even cope with getting his own email to work, let alone working out how to reverse engineer some genius hacker's work to help some lady who talks like she's on crack and doesn't know why her bank account is empty... And it's the fifth time this morning...

So to fix it, the police department need to get serious about computer crime and just simply establish a department that can deal with it... And keep them separate to fix the issue, and not be a part of the group that deals with local computer crime, etc.

Just one person per state who understands technology at a basic level (eg, like most people who read this forum) is enough.

And then this one person can spend some time networking with cops from around the world (heck, send them to some junket in a hotel once a year so they can meet all the others... Maybe blackhat or something) and then knows how to apply the laws correctly and how to go after these people...

And THEN the problem starts to get fixed.

Ranting aside, I know how the situation works. I've been on the prosecuting end of several cases, in which I did the legwork. I tracked down the evidence, and prepared a one-page brief for the police involved, including details on the exact crime committed, the evidence, who has the evidence and the phone numner to call to get it.

If you give the police a target they can understand, they usually are more than willing to take the case on.

When I last did that, they even sent a raiding party and siezed the guy, his computer and everything else within hours of my sending the details. They had a written confession out of him within two hours!

Most people who are still feeling the umbrage of having been owned don't understand this and it's not suprising the police don't want to help, especially when they don't know where to start.

My experience is that the existing laws are usually sufficient. It's the will and knowledge to implement them that are lacking.

GrpA

Re:What kind of crime would it fight?

[Antique Geekmeister]

No, 'the police' really can't deal with a lot of it. As soon as it crosses city lines, your local police won't touch it. As soon as it crosses state lines, it gets handed off to the FBI, who seem simply unable and unwilling to prosecute anything below a massive threshold, and seem chronically unable to charge people with the crimes they actually did commit, and tries to leverage people as 'informants' to get the 'big fish'. So they accomplish nearly nothing. Wire fraud should really be the Secret Service's jurisdiction, but they're less interested than the FBI. And when it goes international, as many of the phishing frauds do even if they're actually run from the US, then none of them will touch it.

So what it takes is an agency _willing_ to prosecute. The Secret Service could legally take on a lot of it, but after burning their fingers with the Operation Sun Devil and the resulting Steve Jackson case that led to the creation of the EFF, they seem pretty reluctant to even try.

Re:What kind of crime would it fight?

[Antique Geekmeister]

You've apparently not dealt with the police nor the laws on fraud, because you state:

> It doesn't matter if it crosses state or even federal or international lines...

This is amazingly wrong. As soon as it crosses the borders of your local police force's jurisdiction, they *must* escalate it to the authority that covers both jurisdictions, or they have little hope of getting a prosecution. This is from my direct experience with spammer and phishing fraud, and DOS attacks against systems I've dealt with. The local police on each end say 'oohhhh, we can't do that' and pass it to the FBI who completely ignore it. This is with names, dates, times, places, and a careful list of exactly what records they need to subpoena to collect the evidence for conviction. The local police on each end simply will not act.

And I expect the Secret Service to do this, for example, because they are the enforcement arm of the US Treasury: fiscal fraud is what they do (or are supposed to do). Guarding VIP's like the President was added to their responsibilities in the 19th century, but their role as fiscal agents is older, and it remains part of their charter.

One World Government

[MindlessAutomata]

No, don't write me off as a NEW WORLD ORDER!!!! guy.

Interpol is dangerously close to a one-world-government type deal. If you're into "global democracy" and the entire world under one flag, then an international police on the internet is probably no big deal to you.

But if you're afraid of big, monolithic governments as much as I am, then you'll be deathly afraid of any international police body, as Internet Police isn't just a bad idea, it's also a very dangerous slippery slope to be treading on.

Still not convinced it's not a good idea? A lot of nations have insufferable politically-correct speech laws. Germany, for example; there they censor politically undesirable viewpoints (yes, Nazis, but if you believe that freedom of speech of the individual transcends whatever the masses may think...) and in Australia, they censor games like GTAIV and other 'socially undesirable' expression.

And maybe some people aren't bothered by that. Some people think, "hey, if some majority accepted that, then tough luck for the minority, democracy prevails!" but I am just not one of them and I'll never be comfortable with governments treading on individual freedom whether a single ruler or the many stepping on them.

Re:One World Government

[Fluffeh]

Interpol is dangerously close to a one-world-government type deal. If you're into "global democracy" and the entire world under one flag, then an international police on the internet is probably no big deal to you.

Yeah, look, sorry, I can't disagree more. Interpol is not remotely close to a one-world-government deal at all. Those guys are lucky to be able to help a handful of governments catch a handful of criminals when all parties want them in prison.

While I think that an "internet police" is a laughable idea in that it would be impossible to unify all the countries with access to the internet under one police umbrella, I think doing so could have some fantastic opportunities that /. seems to have missed as the "oh gawd, the government is after my rights" folks jumped right out onto the bandwagon here first. Think about these tasks that I would love to see internet police on the case for:

1) Spam.
2) Spam.
3) Trojans on websites
4) Browser Hijacking
5) Fleecing through fake Paypal/Bank/Money websites

I am aware that point one and two may look the same, but I feel it would be in most people's minds enough to warrant those two places. If I could have a "report this as spam" button in my email client and know that it would actually go somewhere to someone to do something, man, that would be a sweet thing indeed. What's this? A website that opens a bazzilion popup windows and refuses to let me close my windows? BAM! Hit that police button right there!

Come on slashies, have a look at some of the positive possibilities here. Don't make me have to use a car analogy!

If this were to happen

[Centurix]

They should wear uniforms made from lycra, wear bright red codpieces and a cape. That much power should come with a high level of public humiliation.