„Investigators and experts responsible for solving computer crimes and cyber-attacks came from 13 countries to receive special training,“ said Üllar Lanno, Director of EKEI. „All three Baltic States, Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czech, Slovakia, Greece and Turkey were involved.“
According to Lanno, the special value of the conference was the fact that the FBI brought to Tallinn a specific computer network together with the network devices which allowed the participants to try out all the attacks themselves and learn them technically after learning them theoretically. „The focus was on computer attacks, malware and also restoring evidence necessary for a court and monitoring network connections.“
Shawn Henry, the Assistant Director of the FBI's Cyber Division, noted that the partnership that has been established and developed with the Estonians has been tremendous. “We've had great success recently with a number of investigations where, in cooperative effort with the FBI and the Estonian government and the Estonian police, we've been able to identify and arrest some people.”
Henry added that “the FBI plans to put a cyber expert to work full-time here in Estonia, to just focus on cyber crime and to continue the partnership and the success that we've had to continue moving that forward.”
„It is a definite mark of trust that the FBI, one of the world's largest investigative bureaus wants to support the future developments of Estonia in the field of cyber-protection and our ability to solve cyber-crimes more quickly,“ said Üllar Lanno.
According to him, computer expertise was first applied in EKEI already in 2004. „Today, information technology experts are analyzing and investigating digital evidence related to e-crimes and cyber-attacks, performing speech and audio analyses and preparing expert evaluations of digital images from both security camera recordings and pictures distributed via the Internet.“
The amount of digital evidence has increased significantly since 2004 – EKEI deals with solving 150 e-crimes per year on average. „In October of next year, when the new building for forensic sciences will be completed, we will be ready to assign up to 20 experts to investigate cyber-crimes in the most modern and contemporary laboratory of the entire region,“ said Lanno.
According to FBI, Tallinn was selected as a venue for the first-ever Eurasian Advanced Cyber Conference because of the close working relationship the FBI enjoys with Estonia in the field of cyber crime, as well as the professionalism of its cyber crimes investigators.
The Eurasian Advanced Cyber Conference took place in Tallinn, on May 10-15.
Diana Kõmmus
Estonian Ministry of Justice
Press Officer