ABA, APWG, FSTC Plan Counter-eCrime Operations Summit

The 2007 Counter-eCrime Operations Summit on May 30 and 31 at the State Bar of California building in San Francisco will engage questions of operational challenges and the development of common resources for the first responders and forensic analysts who confront the ecrime threat every day as part of their workaday brief. The conference will present: informative case studies by ecrime responders; discussions about the development of shared resources like common data formats for ecrime reporting, alerting and coordinating mechanisms; and the federation of phishing attack databases now in development at the APWG and its global research partners.

APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy said, “This conference is about managing ecrime events, basically making routine work of handling them, exercises which today too often resemble unplanned fire drills. The organizing question here is how can financial services companies, law enforcement, security people and technologists achieve operational elegance in detecting, deflecting, terminating and sharing data about these events and their perpetrators?”

“FSTC is pleased to be partnering with ABA and APWG on this important conference,” said Dan Schutzer, Executive Director FSTC. “Combating eCrime is an important area of concern of our members. and a key focus for FSTC is how to improve our collective ability to combat eCrime through real-time sharing of data and fraudulent patterns. This troika will be an opportunity for the FSTC to share and expand the cyber-crime work (i.e. the Counter-Phishing Initiative, the Better Mutual Authentication project, etc.) they have been doing over the last 3 years,” Mr. Schutzer said.

Wayne Abernathy, Executive Director for Financial Institutions Policy and Regulatory Affairs at the American Bankers Association, said, "Banks have a well-earned reputation for protecting things of value, and high on the list of our customers' valuable possessions is their sensitive financial information. Banks are proud to be standard setters in the efforts at safeguarding that information. And groups like the APWG are essential in the effort to defend sensitive information against crooks, and thieves, and other criminals. Banks know that this protective work is never done; that is why we are happy to partner with such tireless organizations as the APWG, to ensure that consumers receive the highest level of protection possible. Teamwork is essential to prevent, detect, and punish crime perpetrated against customers over the Internet. Conferences such as this help share information, tools and techniques to protect customers from Internet-based crime."

CeCOS 2007 will hold presentations, Round Table discussions and colloquia exploring three distinct operational dimensions: detection and response operations, shared resources and industrial policies that affect the work of the responder:

Presenters from industry, private law enforcement companies and public law enforcement, government agencies will review case studies offering instruction in the skills exercised, expertise recruited and tools employed to resolve ecrime events and leverage the information exhaust in those cases for further advantage in subsequent forensic applications.

APWG and its Global Research Partners will consider the shared data resources and federated alerting mechanisms being proposed or in development by the APWG, its Global Research Partners and its correspondent organizations. Among those developments are standard formats for reporting and exchanging data about ecrime events, the development and federation of alerting and coordinating mechanisms, and the development and federation of ecrime data repositories.

Finally, the conference will engage questions of industrial policies that can complicate the work of the exploited brandholder and the first responder. Among those will be an examination of the role of the domain name registration system that is exploited by phishers as well as protocols for take-downs and forensic activities that can create barriers for effective counter-crime work between the obligatory correspondent/stakeholders that are contemporaneously and spontaneously thrown together by way of phishing attacks.

Parties interested in proposing presentations, Round Tables of colloquia can send them to: proposals@antiphishing.org

The two day event has a staggered fee structure with a conference charge of $125 for members of the APWG, ABA and FSTC and $175 for non-members. The conference notes page is here: http://antiphishing.org/events/2007_operationsSummit.html