Ahead of UK home secretary Amber Rudd’s speech this afternoon on a planned crackdown criminals using the dark web, Ross Rustici, Senior Director, Intelligence Services at Cybereason commented below.
Ross Rustici, Senior Director, Intelligence Services at Cybereason:
“The UK is a little different than the US in the fact that GCHQ has a mandate to address child pornography in addition to national security concerns, so the headlines are a little misleading. It isn’t 14 million to start dealing with this issue, it is 14 million to focus on a very specific task. Is it enough? No. Is it better than what they have now? Yes. There is no amount of money that will solve this issue. It is transnational and ever evolving. Getting more beat police officers involved will help with the low level cyber crime, which, in turn will free up resources to go after harder problems.
“Black markets on the dark web is less of a hydra problem than one might expect. Fundamentally, the market places have to operate on a basis of trust. If criminals don’t believe that they are anonymous while conducting the illegal activity they are unlikely to conduct it in that forum. The take down of Alpha Bay shook this trust quite a lot. If Interpol/Europol can take down a few more of the major markets, the ones that replace them will be less robust and trafficked. This doesn’t solve the problem, but it increases the cost of conducting the illegal activity which will hopefully serve as another deterrent.”
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