Meeting virtually at INTERPOL’s 16th annual conference for NCBs (6 – 8 July), some 300 senior police officials from 167 countries reviewed major initiatives ranging from operational and investigative support to expanding INTERPOL’s I-24/7 secure communications network to the national police and border control agencies.
These senior police officials have endorsed measures to boost the role of National Central Bureaus (NCBs) as a gateway between INTERPOL and frontline police. “In spite of the pandemic, the number of records entrusted to INTERPOL by NCBs over the past year has increased by 10 percent to reach a record 115 million, demonstrating their role at the heart of our global early warning system,” said INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock.
<p>As predicted by many cybersecurity experts and criminologists, the ongoing pandemic will progressively exacerbate global poverty and push young talent to commit Internet crime. Deprived of fair employment opportunities or being offered very modest salaries in isolated developing countries, more and more school graduates and junior security experts try their luck on the dark side, as it pays very well. A monthly income of a ransomware gang member largely surpasses an average salary of a security engineer, let alone unstable pay-outs of bug bounty hunters.</p>
<p>Worse, organizations are significantly disrupted by the pandemic, working from home and the myriad of interrelated problems – eventually becoming a low-hanging fruit even for technically inexperienced cybercriminals. Most cyber units of law enforcement agencies – even in the developed Western countries – are now struggling with avalanches of new complaints, oftentimes having no capacities to investigate “small” crimes that, however, represent a huge loss for an individual or a family. Governments should urgently increase financing of law enforcement units in the digital space, otherwise, in a few years they will likely lose control over the Internet.</p>