Okay if you want a job combating Cyber crime where do you look?

[TheAnimus]

lets just say its a lot more than a CRB if your looking at non police government related and leave it at that.

[kushtibari]

Almost all police forces have a high tech crime unit. Within these, depending on the size of the force, there are a variety of roles from forensic examiner, technician, investigator etc.

Investigators and examiners tend to be police officers who receive training in the field. Technicians (and some examiners) are usually civilian staff on lower money. Police thinking is that if they train their civilian staff too well they'll go off and get better jobs elsewhere.

In other words to do 'cyber crime' in a law enforcement environment you would probably need to join the police first (unless going down the SOCA, customs route), do 2 years probation, and then get lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to get into a forensic examiners post. In some forces they will only advertise amongst substantive detectives, which would make it even tougher. The thinking being they'd rather train detectives to be computer examiners, as opposed to training computer examiners to be detectives.

Once you're in the post bear in mind that the major part of your average day will be looking at images of children being abused, some of whom may be very young. It isn't pleasant (but very rewarding if your evidence convicts a predatory paedophile).

People to contact in a law enforcement environment would be the likes of CEOPS or maybe West Midlands police (iirc outside the Met they have the biggest high tech unit, which also strikes me as being quite well organised).

Other private firms that I've been impressed with are 7safe and Control Risks.

[Moby-Dick]

I managed to speak to my friend this evening and I think he more or less echo'd the comments made here. Mush of the techie work is outsourced although there are some civilians working for then who would be recruited in the normal way.

http://www.metpolicecareers.co.uk

[chrestomanci]

I recommend anyone who is interested to read Security Engineering by Ross Anderson.

It is a proper full length text book, that the author has put online (you can also buy a paper copy from amazon etc.) I have read it and it is very interesting and covers a lot of topics. Some topics such as the chapter on seals is not immediately computer related, but for example the frauds that lorry drivers use to cheat their taco graphs have equivalents in the computer world.

I also suggest you read comp.risks. It is a newsgroup where reports of serous computer and technology failures are reported, and experts give their view. Obviously only some of them are due to Cyber crime but it is all instructive. I have been reading comp.risks for about 10 years now. Ross Anderson is a regular contributer to comp.risks