Defending against a ‘proliferation of cyber crime’
Craig Richardson, CEO of Wynyard, spoke to Philip Ingram from SecurityNewsDesk recently after Wynyard exhibited at the first INTERRPOL World conference and expo and at Counter Terror Expo in London.
So who are Wynyard?
“Wynyard are the market leaders in crime fighting software,” said Richardson. “We were only founded in 2012 and floated on the New Zealand stock exchange that year and are floating on the Australian Stock Exchange later this year. We have taken off and are widely regarded as the market leader in Crime fighting software and particularly focused on the serious crime market.”
Richardson outlined that there has been a shift in the types of crime we are seeing, with a decline in ‘traditional’ crime in developed countries, a growth in transnational and serious organised crime with a third trend being the growth in globalisation and new generation terrorism closely followed by cyber crime and the proliferation of cybercrime.
With all of these shifts, the commonality revolves around the big data issues that government organisations have with regard to fighting these trends – and this is where Wynyard software comes in.
Richardson said, “Wynyard have the best big data management and investigations software in the market and the last two years we have pushed into five or six key regions in the world.”
The Wynyard platform is designed to ingest petabytes of structured and unstructured data such as emails, open source intelligence and runs algorithms that look for anomalies in the data and relationships taking what used to be done manually into the auto processing world and outputting through a number of visualisation tools.
Key customers are in the national security area such as defence or police forces, and Wynyard can help these organisations access wider open source data sources.
Wynyard are truly global with offices in Australia, New Zealand, Washington DC, Toronto and the Middle East with customers including the New Zealand Police, the Metropolitan Police in London, Australian Federal Police and Thai Police out of about 100 main customers.
Of the new Interpol Global Complex for innovation (ICGI), opened at INTERRPOL World, Richardson said, “It is a great idea in its embryonic stages and is probably under resourced for the scale of what it is trying to do.”
His wider observations are that most police forces around the world are poorly resourced to deal with cyber enabled crime and totally under resourced to deal with what he called new generation cyber crime such as industrial espionage and theft of IP.
The fundamental problem he said is “that most police forces are set up to deal with crime after the fact and this is where INTERPOL have a fantastic opportunity to help with education, capability building and enablement by facilitating discussions between countries. “
Many of the customers Wynyard deal with are seeing a very real growth in the high end cyber crimes such as theft of IP but these are not the sort of things companies will necessarily admit to because of the impact on their market position and this does not lend itself to traditional policing methods, that is if the perpetrators could be tracked and brought to justice.
Many of the criminal networks operating in this are state sponsored or part of large commercial entities so have the resources to recruit the best ‘cyber criminals’ alongside some of the best R&D facilities. The average member of the public doesn’t realise that there is a very mature market for building, supplying and using tools to break into networks and the people dealing in this market operate anonymously in the dark web.
Looking forward there are serious challenges ahead for policing, and it is not something they are currently configured to deal with. Richardson said that the areas in the future that really should be causing concern are: the growth into the trillion dollar organised crime market, trafficking drugs, guns, humans and now intellectual property; new generation terrorism and all of the transnational difficulties that generates; and the last is really the cybercrime area with industrial espionage being the easiest and most profitable crime.
Opportunities through forces retooling and INTERPOL are enabling a huge opportunity for increasing the capabilities fighting against organised and transnational crime.
