OSCE trains Turkmenistan’s officials in digital forensics

The OSCE Secretariat’s Transnational Threats Department (TNTD) and the OSCE Centre in Ashgabat held a course on digital forensics at the Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Turkmenistan from 19 to 22 September 2023.

Delivered by international experts, the course introduced over twenty representatives – from the Turkmenistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Prosecutor General and the Cybersecurity Services of the “Turkmenaragatnashyk” Agency – to digital forensics, computer data, as well as open-source data analysis tools.

“Today, electronic evidence is crucial. Digital devices are involved in the majority of investigations and can contain critical evidence, regardless of whether the crime took place online or offline,” said Ion Gaina, Head of the IT forensic department at the Forensic and Judicial Expertise Centre of the General Inspectorate of Moldovan Police.

“With the widespread use of digital technologies, digital forensics has become an increasingly important field, and digital forensic capacities are essential to secure electronic evidence that can be used in criminal proceedings,” underlined Giorgi Pirveli, Head of the National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) under the Ministry of Justice of Georgia.

The course was delivered as part of the extra-budgetary project “Capacity Building on Combating Cybercrime in Central Asia”, funded by the United States, Germany and the Republic of Korea.

This was the second national training event in Turkmenistan that took place as part of this project. The first training course on cybercrime and digital evidence was delivered in May for the same group of participants, with a third course envisaged for November 2023.