Fergie's Tech Blog

APWG Suggests e-Crime Reporting System

Jeremy Kirk writes on TechWorld:

A group dedicated to fighting phishing scams has developed a way for police and other organisations to report e-crimes in a common data format readable by a web browser or other application.

The challenge facing law enforcement and security organisations is a lack of a coherent reporting system, said Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), a consortium that tracks Internet fraud and scams.

Until now, there was no standard way to file an e-crime report. That makes it hard to coordinate the vast amount of data that is collected on cybercrime, Cassidy said.

APWG decided to develop a terminal file format for e-crime incidents. APWG wanted reports to have unambiguous time stamps, support for different languages, support for attaching malware and the ability to classify the kind of fraud and the company brand that was being attacked, Cassidy said.

APWG couldn't find an existing data model that was perfect. But the group did see potential for the XML-based Instant Object Description Exchange Format (IODEF), which was already being used by computer incident response teams to report adverse network events.

"It had a lot of the things we needed," Cassidy said.

APWG has created some extensions to IODEF to cover its other needs.

More here.

Note: Hopefully I will see you at the 3rd APWG Counter e-Crime Operations Summit (CeCOS III) in Barcelona in mid-May 2009. Details here. -ferg

posted by Fergie @ 3/11/2009 06:13:00 PM