Cybercrime is a risk for any society, weakens confidence in Information and Communication technologies and threatens international peace and stability. In its fight against cybercrime, one of the most difficult challenges for the European Union is to homogenise the jurisdictions of the Member States, promoting common collaboration frameworks (from legal and technical perspectives) and developing more advanced tools.

Hence, EU projects should make efforts to achieve high-quality results, cover a clearly demanded need and generate a permanent impact. To this end, LOCARD has recently joined forces with its sister project ROXANNE, which brings a consortium composed by Law Enforcement Agencies, industry and academia. Amongst its main objectives, ROXANNE aims to improve and assist police investigations by developing tools to accelerate investigative processes, and an interactive platform with AI intelligence that will combine advanced text, speech, and language technologies, along with network analysis. 

Our project was presented last Tuesday 17th by Pablo López-Aguilar at the APWG eCrime 2020 Symposium. During the presentation (available HERE), Pablo highlighted the importance to find a common framework in the handling of digital evidence among different jurisdictions, as one of the biggest challenges that we have to face in Europe and probably also in the world.

Indeed, to develop a mechanism to standardise digital forensic procedures may increase the quality of digital forensic reports and, therefore, foster digital forensics best practices and facilitate sharing and admissibility of reports across jurisdictions.

The University of Piraeus, Athena Research Center, and Neurosoft through its cybersecurity solution Neutrify, just released a detailed white paper regarding the latest campaign of Emotet, which had a significant impact in several countries worldwide. The paper (available HERE) aims to assess the potential impact of the threat.

LOCARD was presented by Pablo López-Aguilar last September 30th at the webinar «Criminal justice authorities and multi-national service providers: enhancing public-private cooperation in cyberspace» organised by Council of Europe, APWG and APWG.eu. The programmed sessions were strictly addressed to officials from criminal justice authorities and representatives of institutions responsible for cybercrime policies and legislation.

LOCARD presentation is available in the following LINK.

White paper on the use of blockchain technology for evidence management aiming to point out the relevance of the work developed in the LOCARD project in terms of digital evidence control and management. The white paper can be found here.

We are pleased to announce the recent publication of the LOCARD's review of the state of the art on blockchain technology at the latest Cybercrime Digest report of the Council of Europe. This bi-weekly report, led by the Cybercrime Programme Office (C-PROC), selects relevant news and offers readers an updated outlook on cybercrime advancements.