The online child sexual abuse has been one of the cybercrime areas most affected during the COVID-19 crisis, as both children and offenders have been forced to stay home and spend more time on the internet. 

In this lines, the Europol has published, last June 19th 2020, a report aimed at finding ways to confront the serious threat to children’s safety. Some of its key findings are described below:

The European Standards Organization (ESO), ETSI, has released the document "Techniques for assurance of digital material used in legal proceedings" that aims to define a process of receiving, transforming and outputting material that can be assured digitally (Digital Evidence Bag) and to identify ways to provide assurance of material used in legal proceeding. The document presents a "set of extra tools for those wanting to demonstrate the integrity of digital evidence".

Next April 27th, the Council of Europe will organize the webinar Global State of Cybercrime Legislation particularly useful for officials involved in drafting/applying cybercrime legislation/policies.

Criminal Chain of Custody - Can new technology secure evidence?

Criminal Chain of Custody - Can new technology secure evidence? Addressing Technological Disruption in the Workplace. This was the topic for EEMA’s first Virtual High Level Fireside Briefing, which took place on 24th March.

More than 100 attendees representing 24 countries participated in the hour-long debate, that was Chaired by EEMA’s Jon Shamah. He was joined by James Rapinac, Director of Communications at Gallup, Vijay Rathour, Partner leading the Digital Forensics and Investigations Group at Grant Thornton, and Paul Kennedy, a Strategic Law Enforcement and Security Presenter.

LOCARD was presented by Mr. Pablo López-Aguilar last May 19th at the ECTEG online General Assembly aimed at bringing together law enforcement agencies, international bodies, academia, private industry and experts.

During the presentation, Mr. López-Aguilar highlighted LOCARD as the ultimate solution of accommodating jurisdictions, territories and global regulation, together with high security demands. Moreover, from the consortium we will carry out a deep research on blockchain technology by studying how to support scalability and efficiency for storing and sharing vast amounts of data with blockchain technologies.

eSkills Malta Foundation, in collaboration and partnership with the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA), University of Malta, Malta Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA), Cyber Security Malta and Keith Cutajar (Court Expert on Digital Forensics) organised a national CyberSecurity Conference on the 5th of February 2020. Featuring speakers from Interpol and the British Computer Society among others, the event focused on challenging an audience comprising business executives and security practitioners on various CyberSecurity topics. Talks ranged from security management, penetration testing, digital forensics, post-quantum security and information security training, to the overlap of information security with innovative technologies.