Earlier this week Jason Jordaan, East London’s international cybercrime boffin, was the guest speaker at the Women's Connect society breakfast at the Blue Lagoon Hotel.
Jordaan is the principal forensic scientist and founder of DFIRLABS, a company based in East London which operates globally.
He is a world-renowned expert in digital forensic fields, incident response, cybercrime investigations, and cybersecurity forensic engineering, and pioneer in digital forensics in South Africa.
He regularly appears as an expert witness in cybercrime legal cases in many countries.
When asked how DFIRLABS’s business was going he said “for us (at DFIR) it’s going really well, which translates to 'very bad' for the companies we are investigating — and there are many of them”.
He opened his talk by asking the audience which of them had been subject to cybercrime attempts, even if it was a low-level “phishing” attempt.
Every delegate in the room raised their hand.
They join nearly 100% of digital device owners in the world.
Phishing attacks are exploratory knowledge searches, in which cyber-criminals dig for information to steal from unsuspecting owners.
Most do not result in a crime. However, the information gathered is often sold by “phishers” to major international crime syndicates.
Phishing, said Jordaan, is a huge international industry, with countless hackers in high rise buildings squirreling away 24/7.
He gave several examples of massive data theft from big companies, many of them South African, who have had to pay huge extortion fees to retrieve their information or else the hackers would publish it.
In a recent case, a South African entrepreneur based in New Zealand lost R19m in a cybercrime attack, with no hope of retrieving it because once they get hold of the money they rapidly transfer it from account to account, wiping out all traces.
“One of the major problems is that, being social animals, we are trusting.”
Jordaan believes SA is on the verge of becoming the cybercrime capital of Africa.
He warned that in a business setting, the owners of valuable information -- valuable to criminals that is -- are legally obliged to protect that information and may not delegate this task to a third party and then effectively “walk away” from all responsibility.
Sections 19 and 21 in the Protection of Information Act compel the owners of information to test their own security measures -- and those of their service providers as well.
The areas that owners of information need to focus on include:
*lists of IT assets and software;
*anti-virus, malware defence and security software details;
*accounts management and access controls; auditing details;
*data recovery and backup procedures;
*network management and monitoring;
*security awareness, control and skills training;
*managing service providers;
*provision of an immediate, detailed and tested action response plan to a hacking; and finally
*Regular “penetration testing”, in which experts, individuals or companies, are commissioned to find ways of breaking into the systems so that the cracks could be identified and repaired.
Jordaan is an assistant professor at the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network and Security) Institute, which is based in the United States.
In this capacity he teaches digital forensics around the world to some of the leading international law enforcement, intelligence, and military units, including the FBI, US Secret Service, Scotland Yard, the UK National Crime Agency, and many others.
He sits on a cybercrime legislation panel advising the SA deputy minister of justice, and has advised the SA Police Service on a national anti-cybercrime strategy.
He is an assessor for the Netherlands Register of Court Experts and is responsible for assessing the competency of digital forensics practitioners testifying in court.
He is a director of the Institute of Commercial Forensic Practitioners of SA and former director of the SA Academy of Forensic Sciences and the SA chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.
He has published a number of books on digital forensics, cyber security and cyber law.
His final “nugget of information” was to tell the women-only audience that most of his staff were women.
They are generally “far more intuitive than men”, he explained, adding one should “never discount feelings”.
Daily Dispatch
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