Michael Whelan
Michael is an experienced cyber analyst at UCD Centre for Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Investigation. He engages with a wide range of sectors including financial services, national government and international law enforcement communities, contributing to the fields cybersecurity and cybercrime investigations. In particular, he works closely with law enforcement officers from across Europe, coordinating and implementing the stages of the software development lifecycle, developing open-source tools for cybercrime investigations.
He is passionate about innovation and education, with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education sector. He has prepared and delivered many modules for Programming for Investigators, Digital Forensics and Online Investigator training courses.
Michael holds a BSc and Research MSc from University College Dublin.
Sessions
The INSPECTr project aims to produce a proof of concept that will demonstrate solutions to many of the issues faced by institutional procedures within law enforcement agencies (LEAs) for combating cybercrime. Unlike other H2020 projects, the results of INSPECTr will be freely available to stakeholders at the end of the project, despite having a low technology readiness level. It is imperative that LEAs fully understand the legal, security and ethical requirements for using disruptive and advanced technologies, particularly with a platform that will provide AI assisted decision making, facilitate intelligence gathering from online data sources and redefine how evidential data is discovered in other jurisdictions and exchanged. However INSPECTr will also require the support of stakeholders beyond the scope of the project, in order to drive further development and investment towards market-readiness. The development of a robust capacity building program has been included in the project to ensure that LEAs can confidently use the system and that they fully understand both the pitfalls and the potential of the platform.
During our training needs analyses, various European instruments, standards and priorities are considered, such as CEPOL’s EU Strategic Training Needs Assessment, the course development standards established by ECTEG and Europol’s Training Competency Framework. With this research and through consultation with internal and external stakeholders, we define the pathways of training for the INSPECTr platform in which we aim to address the various roles in European LEAs and their requirements for the effective delivery and assessment of the course. In keeping with the project’s ethics-by-design approach, the training program produced by INSPECTr will have a strong emphasis on security and the fundamental rights of citizens while addressing the gaps in capabilities and training within the EU LEA community. In this paper we describe the process we apply to curriculum design, based on the findings of our research and our continued engagement with LEA and technical partners throughout the life-cycle of the project.
Cybercrime is a borderless crime that leverages technology and the internet to exploit businesses, communities and individuals. Law enforcement officers responsible for investigating cybercrime need to be equally able to access cutting edge technology to combat these crimes and to bring down criminal networks.
This talk presents the EU-funded INSPECTr project as a solution to many of the issues face by law enforcement agencies. INSPECTr produces and integrates a range of high-tech approaches, including big data analytics, cognitive machine learning and blockchain technologies into a shared intelligence platform that will improve digital investigations and forensic capabilities, and reduce the complexity and cost of cross-border collaboration. The platform is being designed through extensive collaboration with the law enforcement community, incorporates privacy and ethics by design principles, and takes into account relevant national and international legislation.
After the project, the platform will be freely available to the law enforcement community and adoption will be enhanced through training courses, webinars and workshops. Exploitation of the project deliverables will also be available to LEAs who wish to further improve the platform, beyond the scope of the project, through additional research and development activities.