OSCE trains law enforcement and criminal justice officials in Armenia on combatting and preventing cybercrime

About twenty police officers, prosecutors, and representatives of the National Security Service and Investigative Committee of Armenia attended a training course on open-source IT forensics and network investigations held from 20 to 24 December 2021 at the Academy of Justice in Yerevan. The OSCE and the Council of Europe jointly organized the event, with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia.

The training focused on two main fields of cybercrime investigations: open-source intelligence and digital forensics. Three international cybercrime experts equipped the participants with skills, tools and knowledge to successfully investigate different types of cybercrimes aiming at improving their capacities to plan search and seizure digital evidence by using live data forensics tools.

Robert Adilkhanyan,  Head of the Department of Investigation of Cybercrime and High Technology Crime at the Investigative Committee of Armenia attended the training course with his team of investigators and commended the OSCE for their practical activities in the area of cybercrime.

“As a result of this training, the investigators, the police and prosecutors had the opportunity to develop an understanding of the peculiarities of the use of open source intelligence in investigations. The trainers presented different tools, which will be very useful for the daily work of the competent officials. The training was of very high quality, and the number of attendees and their active participation throughout the five days of training certifies this,”” he said.

In particular, the investigators explored and studied network fundamentals, such as TCP/IP and open-source investigation models, and acquired skills to install, run and use virtual machines and commonly used forensic tools like Photorec, Autopsy, Wireshark, and Maltego, among others.

The training was part of the OSCE Extra-Budgetary project “Capacity Building on Combating and Preventing Cybercrime in Armenia” implemented by the Strategic Police Matters Unit of the OSCE Transnational Threats Department. The objective of the project is to strengthen the capacities of the Republic of Armenia to address cybercrime by enhancing the responsiveness of the criminal justice system and of prevention. The project is financially supported by Germany.