Police and geeks
meet in Beersheba to hammer out cybercrime solutions By BEN HARTMAN The Jerusalem Post
06/11/2015
Over a hundred cops, techies, private security
operators, geeks and hackers descended onto Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev on Thursday, to take part in a 28-hour “hackathon” devoted to finding
hi-tech solutions to cybercrime challenges facing law enforcement.
Chief-Supt. Meir Hayon lecturing before the hackathon
The
“Future Cop” hackathon is being hosted at the University’s Guilford Glazer
Faculty of Business and Management’s Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship and
Hi-Tech Management, in collaboration with officer’s from the LAHAV 433
National Crime Unit of the Israel Police, which runs the organization’s cybercrimes
unit.
A hackathon
is an event where programmers, developers and designers work intensively on
projects, often with the goal of solving specific problems or just for
educational purposes.
The event
began Thursday with officials from the Israel Police presenting a series of
cybercrime threats and technological problems facing law enforcement.
Participants broke up into groups, with the goal of brainstorming solutions
overnight until Friday afternoon, at which point the participants are to
present their solutions to judges.
The top
three groups win a mentorship from an officer from the cybercrimes unit, while
runners up receive a cash prize of around NIS 3,200 to invest in a hi-tech
initiative.
burning the midnight oil at the hackathon
The
chairman of the Bengis Center, Prof. Dafna Schwartz, said this week that
the event is part of ongoing cooperation between the center and the Israel
Police in recent months, adding that the Start-Up Nation presents fertile
ground for such initiatives.
“When
people say Start-Up Nation this is what they mean,” Schwartz said.
She added
that the Bengis Center was among organizers of a meeting in late April at a bar
in Tel Aviv “Technology in the Service of Crime,” which brought together police
officers and cybersecurity professionals to discuss online security, the “Dark
Net (darknet)” and other matters relating to crime and hi-tech.
The winners together with (top row) the judges
Police
officers present at the meeting included Asst.-Ch. Menahem Yitzhaki, the
head of the Police Investigations and Intelligence branch and Ch.-
Supt. Meir Hayon, the head of the police cybercrimes unit.
Ahead of
the event, the Israel Police said that the issues they’d work to hammer out
include implementing tablets, smartphones and other devices for use in patrol
cars, methods of collecting and analyzing crime data, intelligence gathering
tools, online forensic tools and ways to prevent and investigate malware and
phishing attacks.
The
60-person cybercrime unit of the Israel Police was founded in late 2012, after
the organization received funding from the Treasury.
At the
time of the unit’s finding, Israel Police Commissioner Insp.-Gen. Yohanan
Danino compared cybercrime to terrorism and called it one of the greatest
challenges facing police departments worldwide.