It is essential that criminal justice authorities and in particular law enforcement agencies have sufficient knowledge to fulfil their roles effectively, also through reliable and continuous training on cybercrime and electronic evidence. To support this goal, the Council of Europe through its Cybercrime Programme Office and the European Cybercrime Training and Education Group (ECTEG) joined forces and delivered to law enforcement officials from 25 countries the Python Programming for Investigators Online Course (ePy3).
Organised in the framework of iPROCEEDS-2 Project, ePy3 was aimed at teaching law enforcement investigators on Python programming language and how to apply it in cybercrime investigations and digital forensic examinations. The course focused predominantly on cybercrime cases, when identification, collection, and analysis of online and digital evidence is required.
ePy3 was designed to be delivered in a blended format, via ECTEG’s training platform, combining the self-paced learning material in the form of theoretical lessons with executable code examples, instruction videos and practical exercises with regular knowledge checks during and at the end of each phase. All activities were monitored and co-ordinated by two experts in Python programming and some of the topics covered were File I/O and Unicode, Regular Expressions, Databases and SQLite Parsing, Web Scraping and Site Monitoring, OSINT and API Programming.
The course officially started on 25th of May 2021 and lasted until 23rd of June 2021. Four webinars have been organised in between, encouraging the participants to ask questions on the assignments they have been granted and to benefit from the experts’ knowledge and expertise. At the same time, the course has been considered a good networking opportunity for creating a small Python iterate investigators community.
iPROCEEDS-2 project webpage
