Computer sleuths ply Internet

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://greenvilleonline.com/news/2003/12/22/2003122221417.htm

By Ron Barnett
STAFF WRITER
rbarnett () greenvillenews com
December 22, 2003 

COLUMBIA - A 13-year-old girl sat at a computer in Orangeburg, making
arrangements to have sex with an older man from Charleston.  At least
that's what the man thought.

When he arrived at the appointed place in Orangeburg, it was not a
young girl who met him.

It was the law.

The "girl" was actually an agent at the South Carolina Computer Crime
Center. The center, which brings together state and federal cyber
crime experts, is one-year-old this month.

And business is booming.

"It is just growing exponentially, said Neal Dolan, the state's top
Secret Service officer. "We bring guys in from around the country for
a week at a time to catch us up."

The center had worked 263 cases through November, said Lt. Chip
Johnson, supervisory special agent for the State Law Enforcement
Division, who oversees day-to-day operations. In the process,
investigators sorted through 5.8 terabytes of information, he said, or
the equivalent of 5,800 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But for all the vast amount of data searched, the number of cases
cracked can be counted without a calculator.

The Computer Crime Center, which was established using more than $5.6
million in federal grants and infused with another $2.2 million this
fall, has made 20 arrests, according to SLED spokeswoman Kathryn
Richardson. That doesn't include arrests other law enforcement
agencies made with assistance from the center, she said.

But locking up criminals isn't the only thrust of the center, which
FBI Director Robert Muller called the first computer crime unit that
combines efforts of state and federal agencies.

The center, which operates discretely out of the third floor of a
mirrored-glass and brick building at a corporate office park off
Interstate 26, also trains law enforcement officers across the state
and is opening communication between high tech industry and law
enforcement that hasn't existed in the past, authorities said.

The center also has erased some of the barriers that have made
computer crime investigations difficult, by combining state and
federal efforts, experts said.

"In the past people have actually had their own territories and areas
where other people could not encroach on," said Majid Hassan,
president of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association, a
California-based public service organization of law enforcement and
private security firms.

The South Carolina Computer Crime Center, he said, is "a vast
improvement over what we had previously."

Jack Wiles, founder of a security training firm in Rock Hill that runs
a high tech crime conference that draws experts from around the world,
said the state's computer crime center leads the nation "by far" with
the quality of its operation.

"There's nothing like it in the country," he said.

Bigger things are yet to come, Johnson says.

Evidence from some "major crimes" in the Upstate has been submitted
that the center is working with local authorities on, Johnson said.

Several big high tech crime cases are still in the investigative
stage, and details can't be released until arrests are made, he said.

The center, which has eight agents from SLED, three from the FBI and
four from the Secret Service, has taken a more aggressive approach
over the last couple of months in cracking down on child exploitation
cases, which make up nearly 2/3 of its caseload, Johnson said.

"We have agents that go undercover on the Internet, posing as a child,
or whatever it necessitates, for these pedophiles to approach," he
said.

In another type case, an Horry County man, disgruntled with his cell
phone provider, allegedly programmed a computer to broadcast text
messages to hundreds of thousands of cell phones, "basically telling
all their customers how bad their provider was."

The number of complaints from customers shut the company's call center
down before the authorities, through subpoena, were able to trace it
to the suspect.

But it's not as though "Big Brother" is watching the Internet, the
officers said.

Investigators have to go through the same legal procedures to spy on
private Internet communications as they would to make a phone tap,
Dolan said. "We can only do what you can do unless we get a court
order," he said.

Most of the time, they don't have to. They log into chat rooms, like
anyone can, and go to Web sites available to the public. Usually, the
evidence to make a charge is stored on the suspect's hard drive, Dolan
said.

That's where the center's computer forensic lab comes into play.

In a workshop lined with powerful computers, specially trained agents
make an exact copy of all the data on a seized hard drive, so
investigators never have to touch the original. They have to be
careful to make sure they don't lose any of the digital information,
which is considered very "fragile."

"There's always the potential for something to happen, and then you
couldn't retrieve it again," Johnson said.

The computer specialists crack the encryption, overcome password
protection and search for the information needed to make a case before
handing it over to an investigator.

The lab is installing a powerful server that will allow agents remote
access information copied from a suspect's hard drive, Johnson said.

Then there are the hackers of the world, who are just as likely to hit
a corporate computer system in South Carolina as anywhere, with their
indiscriminate attack methods.

But setting up shop as a hacker is much easier than tracking down
those who would sneak into other people's computers, Johnson said.

"I don't want to take anything away from it because there's some smart
people that hack," he said. "But it doesn't take a doctorate degree in
computer science to do this type thing and set this up. A lot of it is
just imagination, connectivity and a machine that has the power to do
it."

The center recently established the South Carolina Electronic Crimes
Task Force, which includes members from business, telecommunications,
hospitals, government and law enforcement. It's one of 13 task forces
designated by the Secret Service and the only one not operated
directly by the Secret Service, Dolan said.



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