Subscribe:
RSS feed
Informing Intelligence-Led Policing
Browsing All Posts filed under »Police Intelligence«
Banning Feds From DefCon Is Self Defeating. Here’s Why.
If you’re not familiar with DefCon, the hacker confab that has been meeting in Vegas for more than 20 years, you’re not paying attention to hacking. DefCon (and the accompanying conferences like BlackHat and BSides) makes Vegas the nerdiest place in the universe during July. You don’t want to use an ATM, connect to a […]
How We Learn What We Know, to Chart What We Know
April 29, 2013 by Nick Selby
I spent an enjoyable 20 minutes today speaking with Hilary Sargent, an OSINT rock-star who had to ask me what OSINT was. That’s not to say that she didn’t know – I’m sure she did. But when I told her that it was Open Source INTelligence, and further explained the difference, say, between that and […]
Boston Bombing Investigation: Intel Failure? No. Bad Expectation-Setting? Oh, yeah.
April 24, 2013 by Nick Selby
This is a long post. As either Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, Voltaire or my Uncle Sid said, I didn’t have time to make a shorter post. It ran today in CSO Magazine and will run in other outlets this week (though this version here has some footnotes). In a hurry? Here’s a summary: My conclusion is […]
Onity Hotel-Room Lock-Hacking Triviality Becomes an Issue In Texas
November 28, 2012 by Nick Selby
Last July at the Black Hat conference, security researcher Cody Brocious gave a well-attended and much-discussed presentation in which he responsibly, totally reasonably and helpfully demonstrated the complete fail that is the Onity hotel door lock system. Now, I have skin in this game – I stay in hotels. A lot. So much so that, […]
The City That Became … [How Much] Safer?
November 12, 2012 by Nick Selby
I just picked up a copy of the most racy book available to crime analysts this month, The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation (Advances in Police Theory and Practice) by John A. Eterno and Eli B. Silverman. Eterno was a NYPD officer who rose through the ranks and retired a captain; he and Silverman, […]
Federal Court: Location Tracking via Cell-Phone Pinging is Kosher
August 15, 2012 by Nick Selby
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that police may track the signals eminating from wireless devices, such as cell phones, owned by a person. In United States v Skinner, the court found that a drug dealer whose position was being tracked by the DEA as he and his son […]
HighRoller and CarderProfit: A Tale Of Two S#1tties
June 27, 2012 by Nick Selby
Two significant cybercrime stories are making the rounds: the roll-up of an international sting against carders (see below) and details of a well-coordinated cyber operation targeting corporate bank accounts. There’s plenty of analysis out there on each of these stories so we’re going to give you some overview, some links to resources to get smart […]
Cyber-Criminal OPSEC – a Three-Part Series. Part II: Environmentals
June 12, 2012 by Nick Selby
In Part I of this three-part series, we discussed the most basic of attribution methods, IP address analysis. In Part II, we talk about computer environmentals, and building a device fingerprint. And in Part III, we talk about tools, techniques, tactics and procedures used by cyber criminals. One of the things that mystifies us most […]
BigEye: Meta’s Superb Daily OSINT Roundup
June 1, 2012 by Nick Selby
There are lots of great compendia of OSINT out there for law enforcement, some of which we’ve mentioned in these pages before. One outstanding publication which has been around since 2006 is BigEye News Compilation, a free service from Meta Enterprises, LLC. Some of my favorite daily OSINT reads include the Daily Open Source Critical Infrastructure Report […]
Anonymous Proxy Hunting: When Bad Guys Don’t Leave You A Map To Their House (or, ‘An IP Address Is NOT an Internet Phone Number’)
May 20, 2012 by Nick Selby
Let’s say some bad guys have stolen some credit card or bank account details and they’re using them to make a whole mess of online purchases. If they’ve got seven brain cells to rub together, they’re probably going to be using an anonymous proxy service to make the purchases. If they’ve got an IQ of 101 […]
Criminal Hack versus FOIA request: The Showdown
September 10, 2011 by Nick Selby
It’s been a whirlwind week, and that’s pretty much all I have to say about that. The commercial data loss prevention firm IdentityFinder set its product to search through the 3GB dump of data that criminal hackers stole from Texas law enforcement agencies last week. IF published its findings on Wednesday, which were quoted in several media outlets. The IF […]
An Update Roundup from the PLI Guys
August 31, 2011 by Nick Selby
Some random thoughts since we’ve both been slammed at work and with travel. And for me, clean-up at our house in the Northeast after hurricane Irene blew through. My family was actually among the luckier – friends in Massachusetts are still without power, four days later. First, I was personally happy to see the United […]
Police-Led Intelligence 
July 11, 2013 by Nick Selby
12