“In New Zealand, if you get attacked, you will report that to New Zealand Police. Now, the money might have gone to a bank account in Victoria. So, then the New Zealand Police have to talk to the Victorian police to get a warrant for that money. By the time they’ve got that, the money’s transferred out. The attacker was going through a botnet that probably connected to Singapore. Then we’d have to go and work with police [there] to follow the trail,” he explained.
“By that time, [criminals have] layer upon layer of geography and jurisdictions between them and the police have to go through several layers of international relations before they can continue their investigation. This is exactly why these bad guys have been getting away with it.”
Crime Stoppers International is designed to fight transnational crime, Maiden said.
“If we get a tip that says, for example, the threat actor is sitting in Lithuania, we have relationships with Europol and local law enforcement to be able to go through and then prosecute from there,” he noted.
Once intelligence is developed on the threat actors themselves, Crime Stoppers International aims to also build an understanding of their supporting infrastructure.
“That might be their money laundering systems, their crypto laundering systems, their bulletproof hosting systems – all these systems they use where they might be running a phishing campaign from, or controlling their operations from,” Maiden said.
“Once we’ve got the picture of some of these systems, we can start attacking that and really making their lives miserable.
“I’m quite excited as we move down this path, understanding the people behind it [better], but also the tools and the infrastructure and support systems that they’re using.”
This could also lead to taking on the same systems used by other global criminal organisations, Maiden noted.
“Crime Stoppers isn’t just about cyber criminals; it’s about any type of transnational crime. In some cases, these gangs are into not just cyber crime. They’re into other sort of crimes as well,” he said.
“If we can find some common infrastructure that they’re using for their cyber crimes, as well as some of these other more traditional crimes, we might be able to pull some really bad people off the street. So, I’m definitely bullish about that.”
For New Zealand, the bounty programme can be a supporting tool to help the police in their investigation of cyber crime against the country.
“We should be able to give really valuable intelligence to New Zealand Police about people that are conducting operations against New Zealand citizens,” Maiden said.
“This doesn’t provide a silver bullet, but it provides an international element to international crime to local law enforcement.”
Maiden is keen to talk to any organisations which would like to become involved in the programme.
“We want to work with all organisations,” he said. “If there are any New Zealand organisations that want to be part of this, then look me up because we want to make this a community resource and any support will be accepted gratefully.”
Overall, Maiden is confident the bounty programme will be an effective tool in helping to fight cyber crime.
“I’m pretty optimistic. We might get to this time next year and have some really good success stories behind us,” he added.
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