SINGAPORE: While people will benefit from the roll-out of 5G technology around the world, including in Singapore, it will also pose new challenges for law enforcement officers, Senior Assistant Commissioner (SAC) of Police Soh Kee Hean said on Wednesday (Jul 3).
SAC Soh, who is also director of the Home Team School of Criminal Investigation, said the next-generation mobile network brings with it unprecedented “volume and speed” for users.
Advertisement Advertisement [h=3]READ: Singapore to spend S$40 million to build 5G ecosystem[/h]But the same innovations driving the benefits of 5G can also be abused by cybercriminals for their illegal activities, the police veteran said when asked what emerging technology keeps him awake at night.
Cybercriminals can, for instance, launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks faster as well as download more malicious content into unsuspecting computers, he told CNA during an interview at the sidelines of Interpol World 2019.
It will also be easier for them to make away with large volumes of stolen data and cover their digital footprint while doing so, he added.
Advertisement Advertisement “5G will bring good, but will also allow criminal elements to abuse (the system),” SAC Soh said, and called on law enforcement authorities to be “proactive” in their approaches as well as relook existing policies and laws to see if these are fit for purpose or need to be updated.
But it’s not just emerging tech like 5G that is keeping him occupied.
The director oversees how investigation and forensics officers in the Singapore Police Force (SPF) are trained. In the short span of three years since he took on the position in 2016, SAC Soh said he has observed “lots of differences” in how officers are trained.
TECH DRIVES RISING TRAINING DEMANDS
For one, the volume of training courses is on the rise.
SAC Soh said the number has almost doubled from about 50 in 2015 to almost 100 in 2018, and the increase is to keep pace with officers' needs such as in the area of investigating cyber and white collar crimes as well as understanding new topics like data analytics.
Online crimes is a growing concern here. According to the latest annual crime statistics put out by the SPF, the total number of reported crimes increased by 1.4 per cent in 2018 to 33,134 cases, compared to 32,668 cases the year before. The rise in the number was largely due to scam cases, which grew by 20.6 per cent from 4,805 to 5,796 cases during the same timeframe, it added.
“The changing nature of crime means the demand (for training) is always there,” SAC Soh said.
For example, one training course focuses on what frontline officers should do with a computer suspected to have been used in the commission of a crime.
“They will be taught how to gather and preserve evidence,” the school director said. “These include (questions like): Do you switch on or off the computer? Or do you type on the computer? It might sound really basic but these matters when cases go to court and our evidence gathering is scrutinised.”
Other areas of basic training to raise the competency level of the overall investigation fraternity within the police force include how to trace people’s social media accounts and getting evidence from emails, he added.
For more specialised skills to tackle emerging areas like deepfakes and Internet of Things (IoT), the school partners its foreign counterparts as well as industry players so that local officers pick up best practices and tips, the director said.
[h=3]READ: Deepfakes, the future of video manipulation and election hacking. A commentary[/h]When needed, a cybercrime is simulated to train officers in a real-time environment, he added.
These training programmes are developed in close partnership with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) as well as the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD), SAC Soh said.
On Tuesday, Second Minister of Home Affairs Josephine Teo said in her speech at an Interpol event that “forensics must make a giant leap into the digital frontier”.
The work done by SAC Soh and the school could go some way to making that goal a reality.
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