By Rick Callahan, The Associated Press
In an effort to match wits with the new breed of criminals who use computers to steal money and identities, Indiana police officers are getting advanced computer training to hone their ability to track down cybercriminals.
During a three-day conference that began Wednesday at Purdue University, 20 officers are learning advanced techniques to collect and safeguard evidence that ends up stored as bits of information on computers, cell phones and digital cameras.
Marcus K. Rogers, a Purdue associate professor of computer technology, said the officers, who range from state police detectives to small town officers, all have some degree of training in computer sleuthing.
The course is intended to help them use technology so that they can do an initial examination of a computer crime scene without tainting the evidence.
“Even something as simple as moving a mouse can corrupt evidence -- it’s very fragile,” Rogers said. “Pieces of memory can get overwritten. It’s extremely easy to contaminate.”
All the officers leave the course with special data-collection software written by Purdue computer scientists and a “hardware write blocker” -- a device that prevents accidental writing of data to a suspect’s hard drive.
Obtaining uncorrupted data from a suspect’s computer is crucial to making sure that such evidence is ruled admissible in court, Rogers said.
“This is not like a fingerprint. It’s computer science and mathematics being introduced into the legal arena,” he said. “Some of this stuff exists only in the cyberworld. It’s bits and bytes, interpretations of zeros and ones.”
Rogers said the training sessions, which end Friday, are the first of several planned for law enforcement at Purdue. They are part of a new federal push to enlist local police in fighting the growing problem of cybercrime.
According to FBI estimates, cybercrime costs businesses and the government more than $10 billion a year, with computer-aided identity theft costing an additional $1 billion each year. Many business leaders fear law enforcement lacks the ability to effectively combat computer crimes.
The training is sponsored by Purdue and 20 partners, including the National Institute of Justice, the National White Collar Crime Center and Indiana State Police.
Tom Dillard, a 12-year veteran of the Muncie Police Department whose first computer-related investigation -- an Internet child pornography case -- was just six months ago, hopes the course can improve his computer sleuthing skills.
“I’m the first person in my area I know of who’s involved in this,” Dillard said. “Until now, we’ve farmed these kinds of cases out to state police, the FBI or someone else.”
Rogers, who once worked as a police officer in Canada, said computer forensics goes beyond crimes such as identity theft and embezzlement. He said computer sleuthing increasingly plays a role in crimes such as assault, harassment and homicide where a criminal might have sent an e-mail or instant message about his deed.