Our week here started with two excellent online lectures on digital evidence, and the key challenges of analysis and investigation of cybercrime in the scope of international collaboration by Ms Esther George.
The lecture aroused the interest of both students and teachers, who had the opportunity of learning first-hand about:
- the specifics of the digital evidence
- how cybercrime investigations work
- what the legal ground for the international collaboration is
Among other things, we found out that there is no international definition of cybercrime, but UNODC (United Nations Office on Drug and Crimes) found 14 characteristics in their Comprehensive Study on Cybercrime.
It is a comprehensive study on the problem of cybercrime, and responses to it by member states and the international community.
When dealing with this issue internationally, one must be aware of different jurisdictions:
- different legal systems (Common Law, Civil Law, Hybrid, Islamic Law)
- different powers and functions (prosecutors, police, judge)
- different codes of procedure
There are many types of cybercrime: phishing, cyber stalking, identity theft, data damaged/erased, denial of service attacks, trolling, terrorism, theft of data, child abuse images and online grooming, intellectual property theft, ransomware, money laundering, critical infrastructure attack, and frauds.
With the rise of the pandemic, there are also attacks related specifically to coronavirus, such as bank scams, credit card scams, social media scams, and ransomware.
The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime proposes how to deal with this issue internationally: what the general principles on the international collaboration are, principles related to extradition, mutual legal assistance, etc.