BCS thinktank to help protect 2012 Olympics

The British Computer Society on Monday held the inaugural meeting of a thinktank set up to work with police on addressing cybercrime issues ahead of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The British Computer Society (BCS) Cybercrime Forensics Specialist Group will focus on new developments in cybercrime forensics — the use of scientifically proven methods to gather, process and interpret digital evidence for criminal investigations. The thinktank will also look into the legal issues affecting cybercrime and the process of expert-witness accreditation.

The group brings together academic experts in the field of cybercrime forensics, law-enforcement officials, computing specialists and lawyers, the BCS said.

The BCS noted that the Internet Crime Complaint Center recently placed the UK second in the world for the number of perpetrators of cybercrime, behind only the US, and said online crime is likely to intensify ahead of the 2012 Olympics.

"We particularly want to look at how the Chinese tackled this issue in the lead-up to this year's Olympics Games," said Denis Edgar-Nevill, the group's chairman, in a statement.

Edgar-Nevill also said that the group hopes to help answer the increasing demand for qualified people to participate in investigating cybercrime, given the growing sophistication of attacks on computer systems.

The group will work with the National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) and will be involved in the BCS's already-established conference on Cybercrime Forensics Education and Training (CFET). The second annual CFET conference took place in Canterbury last month.

The BCS experts also plan to help develop standards for data recovery and analysis, give advice on the creation of cybercrime laws, and help assess the quality of software tools used by police cybercrime-forensics teams.