Features Podcast
Breadcrumbs & attribution — Mapping out the training gap in digital investigations

We speak with Nick Ibbott, a retired police detective with 30 years of experience with the York Regional Police in Ontario. Nick has recently founded L.E.A.D. Solutions Inc., which specializes in Training and Consulting on Digital Investigations and Cyber Security for Law Enforcement and Investigative Agencies. L.E.A.D.S. stands for Law Enforcement Advanced Development Solutions.

We wade into the cyber landscape with Ibbott and the law enforcement training gap he’s seeing when it comes to wrangling digital crimes and investigations. A big question he’s hearing is: “How do we attribute crimes when all this data is floating around?”

We also touch on a “CEO” scam where the cybercriminals posed as a legitimate business and misled the victim company into transferring money. The suspects had created more than 10 other false addresses with websites that were very similar to real companies, Ibbott shares.

“There were digital breadcrumbs left everywhere here,” he says. “Every one of those domain names has to be hosted by a domain company. The domain company has to get paid by a credit card. That credit card creates attribution to a person. Every time a person logs into the website, that creates attribution as they’re logging in from a computer…”

Law enforcement needs to educate their own members on the tools to tackle these types of crimes, Ibbott says.

“If law enforcement were to use private sector tools to create attribution or find attribution… there has to be a clear understanding of how to use that data and it needs to be in a way which prevents any unsavory perceptions by the general public.”

Listen to the SoundCloud link below for the full conversation.

Special thanks to Altia-ABM for sponsoring Episode Two.

The views expressed in this podcast are solely the views of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of his former employer.

RELATED STORY: Missed Episode One of Blue Line, The Podcast? Catch it here. And you can read Ibbott’s article, “Top six cybercrime prevention tips: Advice for law enforcement professionals to pass along to cybercrime victims,” here as well.