Combatting Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism Challenges, Trends and Priorities

Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics and Director of CENTRIC (Centre of excellence in terrorism, resilience, intelligence and organised crime research). Babak has more than 100 referred publications on security, OSINT, counter terrorism and cybercrime. He is principal investigator and technical lead in several multimillion Euros international security initiatives.  He has co-edited two books on intelligence management – Intelligence Management: Knowledge Driven Frameworks for Combating Terrorism and Organised Crime, and Strategic Intelligence Management: National Security Imperatives and Information and Communications Technologies. Prof Akhgar latest books are titled Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism, An investigators handbook and Application of Big Data for National Security are published by Elsevier. In addition to his scholarly activities, Prof Akhgar is trustee of Police National Legal Database (PNLD), board member of European Organisation for Security and member of SAS UK academic board.

Ben Brewster is a researcher within the Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC) Institute at Sheffield Hallam University. He has a primary research interest in the application of Information Systems and Knowledge Management by law enforcement and security agencies. Ben is currently studying towards a PhD triangulating these interests in relation to their application in intelligence-led initiatives to combat Human Trafficking. Furthermore, he has experience working on a range of multi-disciplinary security focused research projects, including the EU FP7 funded ePOOLICE project focusing the on the use of text analytics and information retrieval tools to support open-source environmental horizon scanning to enable the early detection, pursuit and prevention of organised crime, the EU funded COURAGE project seeking to define a research agenda for Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism, and the DG-Home Affairs funded UINFC2 project centred around user engagement in response to the illegal use of the internet for the purposes of child exploitation.