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Sophistication Among Drug Traffickers Making It Necessary To Conduct Online Drug Investigations

Oct 5, 2019

The problem of drug trafficking is causing global concerns and every country has its own distinct and diverse set of issues that they are battling individually. Cyber security for drug trafficking requires investigators to share information and collaborate regardless of the country they are based in. Collecting data about overseas activities and suspects that are causing problems with drug trafficking domestically is becoming a challenge faced by law-enforcement agencies. Their problem has been compounded by the sophistication among drug traffickers that are increasingly beginning to use the dark web for conducting their activities. It has brought into focus the need to conduct online drug investigations for apprehending drug traffickers by law enforcement agencies throughout the world.

Unlike in the past when drug traffickers peddled their wares physically using the Internet has become a method of selling recreational drugs in the present day. Drug traffickers have created commercial websites by using proxies with the sole intention of marketing their products with the use of any illegal methods that are available. They are using encrypted messaging tools to build communications with drug carriers. Several instances of dark websites operating notoriously have been identified and shut down by law enforcement challenges only to realize the traffickers have used sophisticated methods to begin their activities again.

Between 2011 and 2013 a port in Antwerp Belgium was a victim of a cyber attack when the hackers involved were hired by drug traffickers for breaching the IT systems being used by the port for controlling the movements and locations of containers. Raids conducted by law enforcement agencies resulted in large amounts of drugs, cash, and equipment that could be used for computer hacking. Drug traffickers were using legitimate cargo containers to hide drugs like cocaine to further their activities.

The sophistication observed among drug traffickers has encouraged providers like Cobwebs to develop solutions that can help provide breakthroughs in the investigations. The solutions from this provider have the vital tools to identify and understand drug trafficking chains based on their connections and locations. The essential tools are capable of tackling the challenges by location detection, tracking individuals and their friends, and creating a network graph.

Cobwebs are continuously monitoring and indexing the dark web to seamlessly provide connectivity to many sources of the dark web. They have a robust engine that lets analysts search for people with keywords for evaluating and monitoring forums and markets to trigger real-time alerts for discovering malicious activities, individual performers as well as their social relations.

They are involved in the predictive monitoring of social media, web layers, dark web monitoring for regularly collecting fresh data to receive relevant intelligence and insights. The calculations are conducted by leading artificial intelligence algorithms with sophisticated models to offer predictive insights such as deviations and targets activities, changes in sentiments, and other unconventional anomalies. The objective of this solution is to isolate and extract the context of messages and text as the natural language processing algorithms are continuously working to process any text collected. The automation technology of the system identifies common entity types in multilingual text from organizations to people, locations and more for providing sentiment types and a multitude of languages.

Drug traffickers despite their sophistication now need to be careful because law enforcement agencies have in possession a tool that helps to not just identify and apprehend them but also keep track of their activities comprehensively. the tool developed by Cobwebs is making it increasingly difficult for drug traffickers to continue with their activities unhindered like they used to do earlier. It can be confirmed with a degree of certainty that success will be achieved by agencies that consider using the solution from Cobwebs to control the problem of drug trafficking.

Source: Technology4wisdom

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