It’s a startling and sobering statistic: human trafficking worldwide has become a $150 billion a year industry with more than 40 million victims. Every year 300,000 children are sold by human traffickers. In the U.S. alone, 300 children are at risk of being sold and exploited every year. While the numbers are staggering and the crimes horrific, human trafficking remains illusory- difficult for law enforcement to solve when the criminals and crimes happen over an IP address or codename with perpetrators based all over the world. While investigators use covert tactics and stings to arrest traffickers, the financial transactions also have become more sophisticated in the dark web. Today’s dark net is commonplace to traffic illegal goods and content; encryption tactics have given traffickers a backend way to post and sell child sexual abuse material (CSAM). With the help of Overwatch by High Wire Networks, organizations may soon be able to do more to monitor and detect human trafficking activity for all organizations and businesses, by correlating and integrating their data into an Open Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform, managed by Overwatch security analysts from a 24/7 security operations center (SOC).
“When the predatory exploitation of human beings becomes common occurrence in today’s society, companies must mobilize to bring about the necessary prevailing change,” said Larry Cameron, Chief Information Security Officer of the Anti-human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative or ATII. “We can use current industry practices to treat CSAM the same as malware and eradicate it accordingly.”
ATII is a non-profit company that started a year and a half ago to promote corporate social responsibility and economic social governance to financial institutions. They provide the tools including data, training, technology and red flag typologies in order for financial institutions to implement anti-human trafficking programs throughout their organizations. Their mission is to protect victims, mostly children, by leveraging data collection, analytics, digital breadcrumbs, forensics, blockchain data, dark web and financial intelligence. ATII also provides training and assists local, state, federal and international law enforcement agencies with investigating human trafficking and child exploitation crimes.
“Without an optimized compliance program, transaction monitoring, awareness training and highly curated datasets, the majority of dirty money transactions would be missed,” added Cameron. “We provide financial institutions with human trafficking risk data in order to scrub against their client base. If a match is detected it will generate an alert which triggers enhanced due diligence checks and providing context within the investigation. We also provide them with red flag typologies and comprehensive training to implement anti-human trafficking programs within compliance departments.”
“Overwatch 24/7 is working with ATII to leverage our XDR platform to mainly detect CSAM the same as it would malware,” said CTO David Barton of Overwatch Managed Security. “The goal is for our platform to alert us of any CSAM on a business network whether it be a computer, USB drive, remote BYOD device or transmitting in/out of the Internet connection in real-time. Our security analysts can monitor for anomalous behaviors and provide law enforcement with critical forensic data that would most likely identity the perpetrators through the comprehensive logging of the platform. Particularly the Username, IP Address, MAC Address, User Agents and multiple other identifiers.”
Overwatch by High Wire Networks and ATII are working together to provide a service that monitors, detects and alerts an organization when content is matched with various indicators that are linked to Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation.
According to ATII, 75% of financial institutions say they are not confident in identifying human trafficking in their customer transactions. In the same study, it also shows 75% of customers say they would drop their bank if it did not demonstrate a proactive attitude to fighting unethical practices.
Find out how you can get involved with AATI: https://followmoneyfightslavery.org/ or #followmoneyfightslavery
Learn more about the Overwatch 24/7 open-XDR platform: https://www.highwirenetworks.com/overwatch/
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