The modern Sherlock Holmes is a digital investigator, tracking down cyber crime across the internet. The most challenging part of fighting cyber crime is the elusive nature of threat actors operating anonymously from behind a computer. Not everyone’s sitting around watching though, since cyber investigators are always lurking in the background, piecing together the clues.

In his book, ‘Hunting Cyber Criminals: A Hacker’s Guide to Online Intelligence Gathering Tools and Techniques’ author Vinny Troia shares his tradecraft for fighting cyber crime. The book covers everything from OSINT automation, criminal psychology to advanced investigative techniques.

Vinny uses personal experiences from investigations, such as the 2-year process of unmasking an infamous cyber crime group, The Dark Overlord. TDO was the hacking group responsible for leaking episodes from Netflix, targeting schools with death threats, and extorting dozens of small businesses during their reign of terror. Vinny’s efforts resulted in the unmasking of TDO’s core members, one who was eventually extradited to the United States to face charges.

Three main takeaways / three key themes for a cyber crime investigation:

1. Vanity trumps OPSEC - For many criminal hackers, notoriety is just as important as financial gain. The desire for attention can create OPSEC flaws for these actors.

2. Have deep access to historical data - Data and the Internet is ever-changing. Having insights into how things have changed is critical for tracing the origins of an incident.

3. Never rely on a single technique - No matter how rudimentary or outdated a tool may be, it never hurts to throw everything you’ve got when it comes to researching an identifier such as a username, number, or picture.

00:00 Intro
00:17 Tracking The Dark Overload
00:56 Vinny Troia’s Methods in Digital Investigation
01:44 Hacker’s Mindset
02:36 Tracing Cryptocurrency in investigations.
03:09 What Digital Investigations Are Like?
04:32 3 Tips for Cyber Investigations
06:42 Why Cyber Crime Is Hard
07:11 Closing Thoughts

Hunting Cyber Criminals: https://www.amazon.com/Hunting-Cyber-...

The Dark Overlord Investigation Report:
https://www.dataviper.io/blog/2020/th...

Abraham Maslow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham...

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