INTERNET AND MOBILE DEVICES. “We are not in the age of Information. We are not in the age of the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection. Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger are our government, businesses, science, culture, and education.” (Xxxxxxxxxx, 2oo8). According to this author, connection is the substance of daily lifestyle of society today, closely tied to new technologies, particularly those which facilitate the contact and communication between people and organizations wherever they are. Those are the case of portable computers, tablets and mobile phones, which through the Internet make that connection possible. “According to a survey by INOV-INESC, the use of mobile phones to access the internet and social networks among young people has doubled in the last three years. The tablet is among the most used devices at home.” (Xxxxxxx, 2o14). The cellphone becomes a ”televerything”, a device that is both phone, camera, television, cinema, news information receiver, emails diffuser and SMS, WAP, sites updater (moblogs) GPS locator, music player (MP3 and other formats), electronic wallet ... now we can talk, watch TV, pay bills, interact with others through SMS, take pictures, listen to music, pay for parking, buy tickets to the cinema, walk into a party and to organize political and / or hedonistic demonstrations (the case of smart and flash mobs) (Xxxxx, 2o15). “Today, the explosion of mobile devices, mainly smart phones, together with Web 2.o applications and the pervasiveness of public access or hacked-into wireless networks together with broadband access have resulted in a significant expansion of the threat” (Xxxxxxx, 2o13). The most relevant vulnerabilities in this sector of technology, since it allows users and criminals, who are in “mobility mode”, to communicate, to access and to transfer data through cybespace, are software and human practices. “Besides compromising the security and privacy of our digital interactions, software vulnerabilities can put at risk other parts of our daily activities, or even our lives” (SysSec, 2o13). The most usual forms of software vulnerabilities are: • Mobile malware, worms and viruses: infecting the software with the purpose to steal sensitive information, thus threatening privacy; • Unsecured or unlicensed applications: “Unlicensed apps can cost a company a lot of money in legal costs. There are even websites that offer rewards to employees who turn in ...
INTERNET AND MOBILE DEVICES. According to the literature, the most critical sources of vulnerabilities are software and human practices. It is difficult to separate internet and mobile devices from social networks when we analyse the needs of the stakeholders. Therefore we have decided to address both items globally, as they require a compreehensive approaches. The measures required dealing with the threats coming from internet, mobile devices and social networks are globally the same. It would be necessary to allow for the easy access to OSINT (open sources) over cyber intelligence methods and mechanisms, creating an effective and actionable intelligence for XXX, not only under the criminal investigation approach but also under a criminal prevention approach/perspective. Most of modus operandi, nowadays applied in cyber terrorism, context and/or in terrorism-related content over internet, come from native cybercrime behaviours and can be supported by cybercrime actors with very high hacking skills. Therefore and considering this scenario, XXX must be technically well equipped, namely with a cyber intelligence solution (cyberterrorism oriented), able to prevent and investigate crime over the internet, with very specific features as follows: • Multi-language; • Ontology (Terrorism-oriented); • Real-Time and auto-translation (e.g. Arabic varieties, Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, etc), also terrorism recruitment channels oriented; • Crawl, collect (e.g. thinking of scenarios that are needed to preserve digital contents before taking down the online terrorist-content web source), index, correlate, analyse, report and predict next criminal acts, in open sources and social media networks which must be agnostic to http/https protocols and applications, meaning that it must also be able to run it against IRC channels, gamming chats, etc], all these operations must run in an anonymous way (access). • The same requirements above, but also being able to run those tasks in a Darknet, like TOR and I2P networks; • Avatar and emulation features, available for the solution operators - analysts and investigators; • Geolocation (geotag) features, especially on most common social networks; • Notification and alert features, based on specific terms, like keywords or hashtags formats criteria; • Must have mobility features and operative system independent, meaning that it could be accessed by operators - analysts and investigators - from a mobile device like smartphones or tablets, over secure access (VPN); • ...
