2407: Investigating Online Exploitation of Children Cases Related to AOL

Thursday, June 24, 2004
8:00am – 9:30am
Presenter: Don Colcolough

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

This interactive presentation will cover emerging technologies designed to combat online victimization of children and how law enforcement can gain from these technologies. The presentation will also deliver a specific overview of the individual interactive features used to commit online crimes against children and a general overview of the AOL system and pertinent subsystems. E-mail, attached files, embedded files, member profiles, instant messages, peer-to-peer file sharing, newsgroups, and web cache will be some of the features specifically detailed. We will cover how these features operate, where they are located, if and how long digital evidence is kept when these features are used, and how to forensically recover this evidence. We will also cover what types of formal requests are needed from law enforcement to yield records and content from America Online services. There will be many recent case examples within this presentation.

PRESENTER BIO

Don Colcolough’s current title at America Online (AOL) is Director of Investigations and Online Security. He is part of the American Online Corporate Legal Department within the Compliance and Investigations Unit. He has spent his entire AOL tenure of ten years in the abuse, security, and investigations arena. Mr. Colcolough managed the American Online Inc. Network Security and Investigations department (NSI) for eight years prior to joining the AOL Corporate Legal department in 2001. The range of abuses that Mr. Colcolough’s operations investigates are child pornography, child exploitation schemes, network intrusion, stalking software piracy, virus and Trojan Horse program production, use of hackware utilities, and online credit card fraud to name a few.

Mr. Colcolough has been involved in thousands of federal, state, US military, and local law enforcement investigations that involve the use of computers and a network within the crime. He is considered an expert by all federal and many state and military courts in areas of AOL, e-mail technology, Internet protocols, and many PC application forensics. As of 2003, he has testified in more than 125 federal, state, and US military trials involving abuse on or related to the AOL owned networks.

Mr. Colcolough has delivered educational lectures to many federal, state, US military, and international law enforcement agencies within the last ten years in order to educate them on properties of investigating cases of crimes that relate to computers and computer networks. He is a routine guest lecturer at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA; the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, GA; the US Naval Justice School; and the US DOJ’s National Advocacy Center.

Mr. Colcolough graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1985 with a Bachelors degree in business with a concentration of business systems and processes.

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