Illegal or unauthorized Internet usage has increased in recent years due to open communications policy in many countries all over the world. The initial effort to prevent, curb and detect these illegal usage activities by using content filtering and application or service blocking solutions have failed as there are too many back door paths. Terrorists start to love the Internet and exploit all possible way of communications among themselves through the Internet. Politicians start to make use of Internet to spread their propaganda and message to their supporters. Illegal betting organizations make use of Internet for illegal transactions. Drugs and weapons dealers exploit the Internet to close on drug and weapons smuggling deals. School and universities students download unauthorized MP3s, Movies and Software from the Internet. More and more people start to make use of Internet for their own benefits in all sorts of ways. The “Online Population?has increased tremendously in recent years.

The concern here is that are we closing our eyes on allowing such kind of illegal, unauthorized or safety threatening activities transmitted over the Internet? What is the best way to detect such kind of activities? It is only through comprehensive detection, alert and monitoring, we can prevent disastrous incident from happening therefore defend the civilian and national security.

The proposed solution to detect and counter such kind of act is to deploy Internet Lawful Interception at Telco or ISP networks.  By deploying such kind of solution, all activities of Internet subscribers (at office or at home) with actual content can be monitored. Alert and notification rules by key words, file extension, parameter or condition can be set. Once the communication content matches the rules defined, immediate alert can be sent by Email or SMS to the related lawful agencies. Advanced analysis on the specific content like source (sender), destination (receiver), IP address, possible location etc can be carried out. These suspicious contents can also be archived, and in case the culprit is brought to the court, all evidence collected can be used. Furthermore, such kind of solution can assist in early detection of possible terrorist activities and prevent them to carry out such kind of action that can cause violence and loss of human life.

Diagram on the next page shows the Telco/ISP Lawful Interception Solution provided by Decision Computer Group. This solution consist of one advanced tap/access switch which collect traffic from the ISP network (exchange) and split the traffic by IP domain (or type) basis to multiple E-Detective (ED) systems for online or on-the-fly decoding and reconstruction. E-Detective systems will immediately reconstruct the collected traffic back to its original content format. The supported protocols include: Email (POP3, SMTP and IMAP), Webmail (Yahoo Mail, Hotmail-Windows Live Mail, Gmail etc.), File Transfer (FTP and P2P), Online Games, IM/Chat (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AOL, QQ, IRC, Google Talk TW, Skype Voice Call Log), HTTP (Link, Content, Reconstruct, Upload/Download, Video Stream) and Telnet. A Centralized Management Server (CMS) will be used to manage all E-Detective systems deployed.  Besides, a PCAP Collector can also be used to store the raw data traffics. The raw data traffic can be analyzed further by exporting it into the E-Detective Decoding Centre (EDDC) for offline reconstruction.  SAN and NAS can be used to keep or store for long term the reconstructed data from all E-Detective systems or from PCAP Collector or the EDDC systems.

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