A newly formed Charlotte nonprofit strives to ensure cyberattack victims win justice.
Gary Warner, Robin Pugh and Ronnie Tokazowski launched Intelligence for Good in June. They created the nonprofit in light of the global increase in cybercrimes, which has prompted businesses in various industries to adopt new solutions and adapt quickly.
The nonprofit is leveraging decades of data collected from victims and open sources to perform analysis and investigations that will expose the criminals behind cyberattacks.
"While there are many good organizations who are doing great work with victim support, information sharing and collaboration, we weren't aware of any who were fulfilling the vision that we have at Intelligence for Good," Pugh, executive director of Intelligence for Good, told CBJ.
The organization hopes its research will provide legal teams with necessary information to make certain scammers are brought to justice and victims can fully recover from cybercrimes. Such offenses could range from romance and cryptocurrency schemes to theft and call center scams.
Intelligence for Good aims to achieve its mission by identifying criminal techniques used to perpetrate scams, using analyzed data to "connect the dots" between isolated crimes. It'll recruit legal resources to create cases for criminal or civil litigation, connect victims to relevant resources for support and form partnerships with proper law enforcement agencies.
"Through our work, we realized that a significant segment of cyber-enabled crimes has no 'natural predator,'" Pugh said. "There is no company, entity or organization who is the victim, and therefore no one who is willing to fund the fight against these crimes and on behalf of these victims."
Intelligence for Good expands upon Warner's work around social-media analysis tools and a group Tokazowski launched over a decade ago that focuses on business email compromise scams. A BEC is an email cybercrime in which an attacker targets a business to defraud the company.
With that framework, the nonprofit aims to identify new websites as well as emerging techniques and methods being used to carry out scams. It can also use its social network intelligence to reveal the true identities behind fake-scammer accounts.
In October, Intelligence for Good won a $200,000 grant from the Gula Tech Foundation, a group created to boost the impact of cybersecurity nonprofit organizations.
Pugh said the funds will allow the nonprofit to achieve its goals, including designing an investigative platform that enables partner organizations to access its data, vet and collaborate with more groups in its mission and launch its first two teams of cybercrime analysts. One team will focus on collecting data on the illegal sales of opioids on the internet, and the other will work on cryptocurrency scams, specifically ones targeting seniors.
"We are building a sustainable ecosystem of justice that listens to the voices of victims, investigates how these crimes work, trains cybercrime intelligence analysts and legal professionals with an investigative mindset, and works toward disruption in concert with law enforcement," Pugh said.
