Author: Dave Davis
ISBN No: 1 899287 58 2
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: Published by Perpetuity Press, PO Box 376, Leicester LE2 1UP. Ring 0116 221 7778. E-mail [email protected]
Year of publication:
Brief:
A Guide To Investigating Using The Internet, by Dave Davis.
Security managers could be forgiven for thinking the internet is so vast and getting vaster that they may as well throw in the towel. The hackers and the manufacturers are so far ahead of the law enforcers and loss preventers that the gap can never be bridged, as if it ever could be. One of the leading internet-using police detectives in the UK has done the private security industry a service by laying out details of the internet and how security managers can use it with confidence to defend their organisation, and even to use the internet as a tool to go onto the offensive and give the hackers and fraudsters something to think about. The author is Detective Inspector Dave Davis who heads a computer evidence unit, set up only this summer by West Midlands Police. The police are as behind as anybody else in their efforts to catch up with the bad guys using computers and the web – as Dave Davis admitted in a seminar at Ifsec 2000, featured in Professional Security in August, training for police officers about the internet is thin and staff dealing with internet crime knowing what they are doing are even thinner on the ground. Not the least reason for reading his A Guide To Investigating Using The Internet is the fact that law enforcers so often do not want to know or are easily discouraged from following up internet-related crime. Admittedly the obstacles to catching hackers are great – the creator or creators of the ILOVEYOU virus are still at large months after they did untold damage across the world, maybe the most damage done by humans other than in a war. A hacker in one country can use a server in another to rob from someone in a third country whose head office is in a fourth country. Which country do you start in’ All too often the security manager gets fobbed off from one to the next, and has to rely on what and who he knows. This book, then, is a necessary self-help guide.</br>
<br>So widespread
Dave Davis’ own career shows what the good guys in the internet-crime-fighting field have to battle against. He has been part of a worldwide operation against paedophiles, and is advising law enforcement agencies and private organisations on how to investigate computer-related commercial fraud. His computer evidence unit has a handful of officers and a stackful of work. He is the first to admit the pros and cons of the internet – criminals can use it like the rest of us, and criminal types are changing because of the internet – the fraudster and credit card cloner can work from his (usually it’s a man) bedroom, without anyone else knowing. He can take on someone else’s identity, or invent one, thanks to the anonymity of the internet. In this book as at his Ifsec 2000 seminar, Dave Davis explains the internet – how it works, and how you and everyone else can access it. He goes through electronic mail (e-mail), internet addressing, the world wide web, newsgroups and how to access them (there are newsgroups for every sort of crime, so that hitherto isolated criminals can pool ideas and send credit card details to another country for fraudulent use there). Inevitably it becomes more involved – with file transfer protocol, internet relay chat, encryption and hiding of data. Yet as Dave Davis points out, the ways criminals get money and information and cover their tracks have similarities with the old, non-web world. And there are useful tools for the investigator, just as there are tools for the hacker, the credit card skimmer and the would-be anarchist bomb-maker. The author goes through the ways you can have covert access to the internet, and how to search for and gather information on the millions, billions of web pages. Throughout this guide Dave Davis gives details of useful websites and where you can download software. If you are coming across internet crime – and a member of his West Midlands unit, Detective Constable Russell May, reported to the SITO annual conference that crime conducted over the web is becoming ever more local – this guide is a starting point for you.
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A Guide To Investigating Using The Internet, by Dave Davis.</br>
