Estonian Police to create cyber crime unit

The Estonian Police and Border Guard Board plans to establish a cyber crime unit in order to take charge of internet-related crime and digital evidence.

The cyber crime unit is intended to make better use of the existing structure given to the Estonian Police and Border Guard board, by the systematic and integral development of the sphere.

The plan is for the new unit to start work at the beginning of the 2016. It will be set up as part of the Central Criminal Police and it is planned to hire eight specialists in addition to those already working in the Central Criminal Police in the cyber crime field.

The head of the Central Criminal Police, Indrek Tibar, said the new division will be created with the aim of enhancing the police's cyber crime fighting capability and will mainly start solving crimes in which information technology is not just the means, but also the target of crime.

"Borrowing the logic of German law, cyber crimes can be categorized into genuine and non-genuine crimes,” said Tibar. “Genuine cyber crimes are those that lack an analog in the physical world. 

“For example, a denial of service attack is possible only in the cyber world as it's not conceivable that the work of an institution or business could be paralysed by knocking a million times on their door. 

“In the case of child pornography, on the other hand, the computer is the tool, not the target of the crime, so this is non-genuine cyber crime," he explained.

According to Tiber, the new unit would be in charge of the 80 or so cases a year which can be treated as genuine cyber crimes and in other cases, support investigators of police branches through its knowledges and skills.