The highly publicised Ashley Madison hack and the plethora of other such attacks prompts me to post about the training that I deliver and have done for several years in different countries and again in Jersey on 7th & 8th December 2015

As part of that training I always conduct a very short needs exercise and ask each delegate what they as an individual want from the course. Invariably the responses are (understandably) “I want to go deeper”, “I want to understand social media”, “How to get to the Dark Web” etc. etc.

Rarely does anyone ever voice any concerns about their ‘online security’ (I dropped the term online privacy a long time ago because frankly it doesn’t exist for the vast majority of us).

If you are using the Internet/Web as an investigative tool it is absolutely essential to understand the risks to you and your organisation when you are online.

If it’s a law enforcement audience one of the analogies might be conducting surveillance, “Would you do that in a marked police vehicle”?

Would you go to a dangerous area without some form of risk assessment? I could go on, but where I am going with this really is that Internet Investigations training isn’t just about talking about the wealth of resources that are out there for a course delegate to exploit. It’s also about planning, searching safely, understanding what’s credible and what might not be credible, questioning everything, questioning the answers.

Click on the wrong link and you could be in a world of pain, sign up for something without giving some thought to your online ID and it could all be very embarrassing.

My humble opinion, this is only going to worse.

I certainly cover online security on my courses and if you are signing up for training please make sure it’s on the agenda.

If you are conducting online research without having some training you might want to think about using people like me. It might just save you a lot of time and money.

Feel free to contact me colin@comsuregroup.com or come along to the training read more and CLICK HERE.