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OSCE hosted training course for South-Eastern Europe on Dark Web and virtual currencies in Tirana

Summary

Providing criminal justice practitioners without IT specialization with a general overview of how all types of criminal activities may be facilitated on the Internet was the focus of a one-week training course hosted by the OSCE from 12 to 16 February 2018 at the Albanian Security Academy in Tirana.

The course, which was organized by the OSCE Secretariat’s Transnational Threats Department, with the support of the OSCE Presence in Albania and the Albanian Security Academy, and delivered in co-operation with EUROPOL’s Cybercrime Centre, was attended by 22 members of various criminal justice institutions from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. In addition to crime investigators, participants also included members of national prosecutors’ offices and courts.

The training provided attendees with the basic knowledge of Internet networking, encryption, and anonymization technologies required to understand the functioning of the Tor anonymity network and darknet criminal business models, and to analyze and investigate Bitcoin transactions and cryptocurrencies in general. The training course was developed by the European Cybercrime Training and Education Group (ECTEG), of which the OSCE is a member.

The course is part of a larger OSCE regional capacity building project and was the second in a series of regional training activities addressing various thematic aspects of combating cybercrime and cyber-enabled crime that will be organized in the coming months. A third training course will take place at the end of February and will focus on live data forensics.

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.