By Milica D. Djekic
Before you make a decision to begin any security task – you need to think hard how to approach any concern being correlated with that job. Even if you deal with the investigation within cyber defense or law enforcement – you require a lot of skills, experience, and expertise in order to effectively resolve such a situation. For instance, let’s imagine that you are the investigator who copes with the cybersecurity cases and who needs to discover the hacker’s incidents and in collaboration with policing prove who has committed those cybercrimes. Also, law enforcement may seek international cooperation in order to bring those cybercriminals to justice. Practically, it’s so important to know how to start your search as well as how to collect the findings and evidence about that scheme. In so many cases, it’s not easy to prove that someone got suspicious for some crime and deal with all the necessary clues that would lead the entire case to capture and arrest of criminals.
The experience would suggest that the hacker’s underworld could get linked with so many variations of the transnational crime, so it’s quite a trickery and sometimes time-consuming to tackle such an investigation. In addition, there could get the phases in the investigation when you may believe that you are wasting your time and, indeed, the fact could be that you are staying with the same place for a long period of time. Simply, you would be stuck with your investigation either for a reason you need to wait in order to get something or because you would suffer the certain lack of good ideas and suggestions how to proceed, so far. The experienced investigators could get the ideas on how to handle some case mainly relying on their previous work in the case management that has appeared through their career. On the other hand, the young police officers or cybercrime investigators could only choose to learn hard in order to become capable to resolve some criminal scenarios. In the practice, that young workforce is under the supervision of the experienced staffs and those guys would so dedicatedly teach the young colleagues how to think, deal and behave in such a situation.
As many experts would suggest, the only certain stuff in the future is a change. In other words, the criminology landscape would change constantly and chronically, so the new generations of law enforcement officers would need to cope with any new trend and tendency so skillfully. The similar situation is within the cyber defense. Even that branch of science and technology would so commonly demand the assistance from the Police Forces and no cybersecurity professional would get capable to resolve anything if he is not well-connected with the law enforcement.
The officers dealing with the wide varieties of criminal offenses would need something that we call the expert knowledge in order to approach some criminal scheme so effectively. The fact is if you do not follow the tendencies in any field being correlated with the criminology – you would not get in position to resolve anything being from the law enforcement interest.
Some good research point is found in the literature would suggest that the enemy is always learning and never sleeps. This is the quite good assumption that may get the great connotation in the practice. Why? If you assume that the overall technological, social and economic landscapes are always changing – you would get why the expert knowledge matters. The expert knowledge could get absorbed through both – theoretical and practical engagements and the vitally significant thing here is to keep learning and gathering the new findings, ideas, and concepts. The knowledge itself is something that would get useful today, but useless tomorrow because the new knowledge would appear in reality, so that’s why you need to follow the tendencies so actively.
The law enforcement agencies in combination with the cyber defense departments could resolve so many cases together. On the other hand, if you count on the expert knowledge and some maturity models – you would get able to understand so many different crime scenarios existing in the practice, so you would easily recognize the one you are coping within your own case. The better you know, the higher the level of your situational awareness would be. Finally, we would come to the strong correlation between expert knowledge and situational awareness. The experience would indicate that once you are aware of the situation – you would have fewer difficulties to resolve it. In other words, the skill is not an ultimate goal in any law enforcement area. What we need at this stage is the powerful expertise even within the young security professionals.
The Cyber industry would hire mainly the youth and those people would get capable to obtain so many complicated tasks either on some devices or online. Those folks should have the encouraging learning curve and demonstrate the capacity to develop the best possible expert knowledge in order to easily get situational awareness. For example, if you work for a cyber industry and some of the operating systems’ consumers have reported some kind of irregularities with their working environment – you would need to discover those vulnerabilities and feasibly malware in order to stay at least a step ahead of your threats.
If you are not capable to obtain so the malicious actors would take advantage over your poor expert knowledge and defeat you. In other words, once you deal with the expertise in some field – you would get capable to handle any situation and even make some predictions about how the situation would look like in the coming time.
In conclusion, the expert knowledge got its purpose in any sort of criminal jurisdictions. It may support us to resolve the cases more effectively and accurately, so it’s strategically important to invest a lot of time and effort into your employees’ professional development. We know that such mechanisms already exist on the marketplace, but we would want to make a suggestion about such approaches social and economic impacts. Differently saying, every single day of the investigation more would cost your budget more. In case you make a powerful workforce out of your staffs – you would get capable to simply play with your tasks and certainly overplay any enemy.
Some ancient saying would suggest that if you know your opponent and yourself – you can win any war. With the good expert knowledge you would undoubtedly get aware of your own capacities and with the deep investigative process – you would build up the helpful situational awareness that would support you in the better understanding of your threat. This may seem like a good way to get such a battle, right?
About The Author
Milica D. Djekic is an Independent Researcher from Subotica, Republic of Serbia. She received her engineering background from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade. She writes for some domestic and overseas presses and she is also the author of the book “The Internet of Things: Concept, Applications, and Security” is published in 2017 with the Lambert Academic Publishing. Milica is also a speaker with the BrightTALK expert’s channel and Cyber Security Summit Europe being held in 2016 as well as CyberCentral Summit 2019 being one of the most exclusive cyber defense events in Europe. She is the member of an ASIS International since 2017 and contributor to the Australian Cyber Security Magazine since 2018. Her fields of interests are cyber defense, technology, and business. Milica is a person with a disability.