Manhattan DA gets $4.2 mln for new cybercrime lab ? Undisputed ...

By Joseph Ax

The Manhattan district attorney?s office will build a new cybercrime lab with $4.2 million in funding from the New York City Council, officials said Tuesday.

Computer crime has been a top priority for District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who created a cybercrime and identity theft unit in 2010 and has emphasized the need for additional resources.

?Cybercrime and identify theft are among the fastest growing crimes in the country,? Vance said in a statement. ?Nearly every case we prosecute ? financial fraud, terrorism, even street crimes ? depends upon the resources and expertise of my Office?s Cybercrime and Identity Theft Bureau.?

The announcement comes less than a week after Vance?s office charged former?Goldman Sachs?computer programmer?Sergey Aleynikov?with stealing secret trading code from the bank. In February, the 2nd U.S Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his federal conviction for the same conduct.

The $4.2 million will be used to build a new lab facility within the district attorney?s offices, enabling prosecutors and forensic analysts to sit in the same location for the first time.

The lab will perform forensic analysis of digital evidence, such as computers and cell phones, and allow prosecutors to draw links between seemingly unconnected incidents.

?In this day and age, we need more sophisticated tools to fight the complex crimes that are taking place on the web ? the new crime scene of the modern age,? Council Speaker Christine Quinn said in a statement.

The funds represent just below 4 percent of the district attorney?s total spending last year. The additional funding comes a month after the city?s 2012-13 budget included a gain of only $250,000 for Vance?s office, the smallest of any of the city?s district attorneys.

Vance?s cybercrime unit has targeted several high-profile identity theft rings in recent years and handles approximately 200 to 300 new identity theft crimes a month.

Last summer, the office indicted 26 individuals accused of trading sexually explicit images of children over the Internet.

According to Vance, the unit analyzes 1,000 cell phones a year, while the number of computers analyzed by the unit nearly tripled from 2010 to 2011.

Source: http://undisputedlegal.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/manhattan-da-gets-4-2-mln-for-new-cybercrime-lab/

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