Cybercrime chief: Online child abusers more sophisticated in hiding crimes
Detective Inspector Paul Gillen said rapid advances in technology were placing “huge challenges” on police all over the world.
Det Insp Gillen, the head of the Computer Crimes Investigation Unit, said its workload had “definitely increased” with rising computer and online crime.
The unit examines all media — from laptops, to CCTV, to cameras and phones — and extracts information for evidence in prosecutions.
He was speaking at the annual conference of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, where he received the 2012 AGSI excellence award for his work in establishing a world-leading educational programme for fighting cybercrime and tackling international paedophile rings.
Det Insp Gillen said the bulk of the unit’s work was in examining cases of online child abuse. “The main one is the investigation of child abuse — people collecting, distributing or sexually assaulting children and taking photographs or making videos and distributing them around the world.
“In some of those cases, perpetrators hide the images, they encrypt them, try to make sure we don’t find them; we have to make sure we’re upskilled.
“In the CCIU, we have encountered child abusers with collections of more than 100,000 explicit images and videos of children being sexually assaulted.”
He said the unit had 26 active child abuse investigations, but both child abusers and financial fraudsters were getting more sophisticated in hiding their crimes.
“At the time I started this work in 1996, or in the early 2000s, it was good enough to find images like this on computers, but now people are using anti-forensic techniques to make sure police aren’t able to find any incriminating evidence.”
He said often they either could not find images or it took them a long time to do so, and that systems were often dispersed, with people keeping data in a number of places.
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