Safe Cybercrime Investigation Technique

It’s a peculiar paradox of investigations: the closer you get to the adversary, the more you risk being corrupted by the proximity. That becomes especially apparent in the world of cybercrime, where gathering threat intelligence means wading into some of the darkest and most dangerous corners of the digital world, where one wrong move could have terrible consequences. A safe cybercrime investigation technique is one that investigators can use to get the information they need without opening the door to danger in the process—and it has never been more important to have one. 

Safe Cybercrime Investigation Technique: An Overview

What is a safe cybercrime investigation technique?

A safe cybercrime investigation is one that does not put the investigator or the organization behind him at risk. Cybercrime investigations, both to anticipate attacks before they happen and to understand attacks while they’re in-progress, often require investigators to enter the dark web or wade into hacker communities where they are at a meaningful amount of risk. Just as undercover investigators must keep their identity and agenda strictly secret, so too must cybercrime investigators—otherwise there could be grave consequences. Every safe cybercrime investigation technique is designed to avoid those consequences so that investigations are as secure as they are revealing. 

What are examples of a safe cybercrime investigation technique? 

Also known as open source intelligence (OSINT) or threat hunting, cybercrime investigations try to learn what hackers are doing to either prevent their next move or stop their current attack. There are multiple ways to gather intelligence, but they all typically fall into two buckets, one much riskier than the other:

• Passive OSINT – Intelligence you can collect without alerting your target to your presence, identity, or intentions. Collecting passive OSINT is generally considered a safe cybercrime investigation technique, which is a positive, however, the readily available nature of this information tends to make it less valuable for cybersecurity purposes. Threat actors are careful to guard their secrets. 
• Active OSINT – Intelligence you collect by actively engaging with threat actors and their affiliates by, for example, asking for information, infiltrating private forums, or sending connection requests. Often this intelligence proves to be of higher value, but active OSINT is the opposite of a safe cybercrime investigation technique because it operates in the open and invites risks and attention as a result. 

What is the benefit of a safe cybercrime investigation technique?

The benefit is you gain the threat intelligence you need to either prevent cyber attacks and increase cyber resilience or else stop an incident currently underway in less time with less damage, and do so without creating any extra risks along the way. What makes this benefit elusive is the fact that high-value intelligence requires high-risk investigations, and knowing when investigations become unsafe isn’t always obvious. To put it differently, safety concerns often keep cyber crime investigations from being as valuable as possible.   

What is the Relevance of a Safe Cybercrime Investigation Technique?

Why do security teams need a safe cybercrime investigation technique?

It has become increasingly important as security teams have spent more time on cybersecurity investigations and depended more on the results of those investigations. Once rather rare, cybercrime investigations have become a standard part of the cybersecurity arsenal as offensive security measures and proactive threat hunting have become a vital part of cyber stability and business continuity. More and more, cybersecurity is about finding and fixing vulnerabilities rather than detecting and responding to threats, so you should expect safe cybercrime investigations to play an even larger role in cybersecurity over time. 

What is the risk of not using a safe cybercrime investigation technique?

Investigators face very real risks when they do not use safe techniques to investigate cyber crime: 

• Compromise investigations: It might be difficult or impossible to continue an investigation after hackers discover your presence. 
• Lose advantage: Without the ability to operate in secret, you lose the best and often only investigative advantage you have. 
• Kill sources: Hackers may flee from known communities and enhance their secrecy to evade being observed, making future investigation harder. 
• Invite infection: The risk of being infected with malware or exposed to other risks while on the dark web or in hacker channels is quite high. 
• Target retribution: Hackers who don’t appreciate your attention might target you for attack to get revenge and discourage further investigation. 

How has the definition of a safe cybercrime investigation technique evolved? 

What counts as a safe technique, not to mention what counts as an effective technique, has been evolving quickly now that AI has been weaponized. AI not only gives threat actors alarming new abilities to orchestrate breaches, it also makes it easier for them to cover their tracks, catch spies in their midst, and launch a counter-offensive. What’s evolving, above all else, is the understanding that not all investigations are safe, and being cavalier about the consequences could be one of the greatest cyber threats companies face. 

Use Flare for a Safe Crimecrime Investigation 

Why is Flare a safe cybercrime investigation technique? 

Flare is both a tool to help you improve cybercrime investigations and also a defense standing between yourself and the possible hazards of those investigations. The Flare platform searches continuously on the clear, deep, and dark webs, including known hacker forums, marketplaces, and Telegram channels, for threat intelligence, then supplies tailored results when it finds things like stolen credentials for sale on the dark web or exposed secrets in a code repository. Flare hunts far and wide for threat intelligence, and since it goes to dangerous places on your behalf, your investigation and organization are not exposed to risk in the process. With Flare, every technique becomes a safe cybercrime investigation technique. 

How does Flare meet the need for a safe cybercrime investigation technique? 

Cybercrime investigations, which are time- and labor-intensive and reliant on large degrees of experience and expertise, often prove to be underwhelming, on top of being riskier than they seem. Flare gives you the ability to investigate outside the company network, across the entire external attack surface, on a continuous basis 24/7/365. Flare has rare access to these spaces, cultivated carefully over time, which opens doors to investigations that would be locked otherwise. 

Does Flare Academy teach safe cybercrime investigation techniques?

The Flare Academy has covered cybercrime investigations in several previous lessons (and will continue in future lessons), and instructors have demonstrated safe techniques on multiple occasions, along with unsafe techniques. Anyone looking to teach these techniques, whether to security teams who are new to cybercrime investigations or ones looking for safer ways to get better threat intelligence, will find valuable resources through the Flare Academy: in-depth lessons from expert instructors, hands-on resources in our Discord community, and peer-to-peer discussion when questions and issues appear. There’s no better way to learn a safe cybercrime investigation technique than from someone down in the trenches of cybersecurity. Get those hard-won insights, for free, from the Flare Academy. 

Safe Cybercrime Investigation Technique and Training with Flare Academy

Flare Academy training provides security practitioners with highly relevant and highly engaging lessons on subjects like threat intelligence, operational security, investigation techniques, and more. Led by expert instructors, these free trainings combine on-demand video lessons with diverse learning tools. Students can also gain access to the Flare Academy Discord Community where they can ask questions, explore advanced topics, and continue their learning journey wherever it leads. 

Find the right option at Flare Academy: sign up for the next training here.