OSCE hosts regional training course on malware investigations in Tirana

Enhancing the knowledge and skills of law enforcement officials from South-Eastern Europe in investigating malicious software (in short malware) was the focus of a OSCE-hosted one-week training course, which concluded on 23 March in Tirana.

The event was attended by 20 members of various criminal justice institutions from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. It was organized by the OSCE Secretariat’s Transnational Threats Department, with the support of the OSCE Presence in Albania and the Albanian Security Academy.

The training provided attendees with practical skills necessary to obtain information from the malware analysis process that can help locate criminals and their infrastructure. The participants learned how to create and deploy a malware sample in a controlled lab environment, extract malware, perform the malware analysis process and utilize open-source intelligence techniques to identify criminals and enumerate their infrastructure.

The training course was developed by the European Cybercrime Training and Education Group (ECTEG), of which the OSCE is a member, and was delivered by an external expert from the Belgian Federal Judicial Police.

The course is part of a larger OSCE regional capacity building project and was the fifth in a series of regional training activities addressing various thematic aspects of combating cybercrime and cyber-enabled crime, taking place from January until the end of April this year. The project is a collaborative endeavour of the OSCE Secretariat’s Transnational Threats Department, the OSCE field operations in South-Eastern Europe, and their respective host authorities. The project’s implementation is steered by a co-ordination board which selects and nominates participants for each regional training activity and will later monitor and evaluate local training activities run by the beneficiaries themselves in the second part of the project.