AFJOC – African Joint Operations against Cybercrime

Summary

Involving up to 49 African countries, this project aim to drive intelligence-led, coordinated actions against cybercrime and their perpetrators in African member countries, by creating a harmonized regional coordination framework that will produce joint action plans and conduct law enforcement activities.

By doing this, the idea is to address the vulnerabilities of weak networks and security under a context of growing underground market and high levels of social engineering/financially motivated threats against vulnerable people.

Details

At the core of this project will be the Africa Cybercrime Operation Desk based in INTERPOL’s Cybercrime Directorate. The desk will initiate and implement the framework and drive joint operations, thereby strengthening Africa states’ capacity and capability to combat cybercrime.

Activities will focus on both pursuing the perpetrators of the cybercrimes in Africa, and also on prevention activities. While the prevention activities will aim to have a wide regional participation, the operational activities will be centred around countries which have already actively engaged with our Cybercrime Directorate to set a baseline for these activities.

The major deliverables of the project will be:

• Framework: The desk will collaborate with the member countries to form a framework for a coordinated response to cybercrimes that will establish work processes that law enforcement agencies in Africa can continue to adopt beyond the life of the project.
• Intelligence: An Africa Cybercrime Threat Assessment will be published annually that will inform stakeholders of the key threats and consolidate regional knowledge.
• Operations: Specific operations will be run on a regional and intra-regional level to collectively address the cyber threats based on actionable intelligence.
• Campaigns: Information awareness campaigns will address the threats at the public level.