Thursday and Friday I spent at the APWG 2006 eCrime Researchers Summit at the National Center for Forensic Science, Orlando, Florida. It was a fascinating mix of law enforcement from a local sheriff to the National Institute of Justice, of researchers from academic grant-funded to big-company in-house, and of commercial from tiny startups to the biggest banks.

Press coverage attitudes also ranged widely, from the local Fox TV channel covering it twice; I didn’t realize I was going to be on the evening news until several people pointed out that the camera when I was speaking was from a TV station. The next morning APWG Sec. Gen. Peter Cassidy gave some tips to the TV audience. In a later session, one of thep presenters asked whether there were any reporters in the room before continuing his point. So I’ll be careful what I report.

The most fascinating thing to me was all these detail-oriented law enforcement people being forced to look at things in an ongoing, cross-case, cross-jurisdiction manner. They’ve mostly already got it that collective action is what’s needed to counter a globally-leveraged scam like phishing, and they’re adapting pretty well.

That’s the LEOs who came to the conference. There were plenty of anecdotes about others who didn’t even use the Internet if they could avoid it. After all, the average law enforcement agency (LEA) in the U.S. is about 30 people total, and they’ve got burglaries, murders, domestic disturbances, etc., to handle; they can’t spend much of their time on things like phishing. Several of the speakers representing national agencies indicated they were doing educational outreach to make dealing with such crimes easier and more proper for such local LEAs.

-jsq