IFCI’s flagship training program is the IFCI-CCI (Cybercrime Investigator) Training course.  The IFCI-CCI teaches students the skills necessary to respond to all kinds of cybercrime incidents, from initial incident response and digital crime scene evidence acquisition to advanced forensic analysis and tracking International cybercriminals across the Internet.

The main goal for this course is to empower the nation’s cyber investigators with the knowledge, skills and abilities to undertake and successfully carry out their own investigations.  This course is the first step for investigators to turn the tables on cyber criminals who are fleecing legitimate economies worldwide of billions of dollars every year.

Some Course highlights include:

• 15  hands-on labs - devised of real world scenarios
• Analysis of Windows forensic artifacts
• Volatile memory analysis
• Network intrusion investigations
• Internet activity and email analysis
• Network traffic data analysis
• International cybercriminal profiling
• Attack vector identification
• Dynamic malware analysis

Anybody whose job requires them to respond to cyber incidents, or anyone with an interest in cybercrime investigation, should take the IFCI-CCI training course.  This course will help you by providing fast solutions to the following emergency situations:

Corporate Risk/Security - Intellectual Property Theft Case:  Your Research and Development Director quits and goes to work for a competitor.

Can you determine if he copied your company’s secrets to a USB drive to take with him?​

Police Investigations - Kidnapping Case: A child is taken from his home at night and the family receives an email with a proof-of-life picture and ransom demand.

Can you extract IP addresses from the email headers to track the offender back to his location, or extract lat/long coordinates from the picture’s EXIF data to determine the exact location the picture was taken?

IT Security Team - Rogue Malware Case: You discover malware on an internal corporate computer but you don’t know what it does or why it’s there.

Can you analyze the malware, determine its capabilities, identify its target data, and destroy its data exfiltration file before your corporate proprietary information is lost?

Federal Cyber Agent - Botnet Investigation Case:  You’ve tracked botnet malware back to a specific set of command and control servers, but what’s the next step?

Can you determine the server’s physical location in the world and research current and historical whois information?  Are you able to research other malicious domains associated with the same IP address and track Command and Control proxy servers back to specific malicious actors?

E-Discovery Analyst - File access case: You’ve recovered and indexed thousands of PDF files on a computer. One was flagged as key to the case and you are asked if the computer owner knew of and accessed this file.

Can you examine the Windows registry and link files to determine the exact time and date that specific users accessed individual files?

Successful completion of the IFCI-CCI training course is an accomplishment that students take great pride in.  The IFCI-CCI certification is a professional credential that can be earned by successfully scoring an 70% or better on a comprehensive exam based on all 12 modules taught in the IFCI-CCI training course.  Students that pass the Certified Cybercrime Investigator (IFCI-CCI) exam will receive a printed and framed certificate to verify their accomplishment, and will be allowed to refer to themselves as an IFCI-CCI Certified Cybercrime Investigator.  They will be granted rights to use the IFCI logo as a professional affiliation or on their resume, and IFCI will verify their certifications to prospective employers.

IFCI Certified Cybercrime Investigators are an elite group of professionals who have worked hard to study, practice, and prepare for real-life cybercrime investigations.  The IFCI-CCI is a key differentiator from other job seekers on the market.  IFCI-CCIs stand out to both companies and Government Agencies as true professionals in the field of cybercrime investigations.

No, anybody can attempt the Certified Cybercrime Investigator exam.  However, the IFCI-CCI training course is a highly recommended prerequisite.  There simply is no other training equivalent to it in breadth and quality and it will be difficult, even for long-term, expert cybercrime investigators, to pass it without undertaking the training course first.

Cybercrime is epidemic. The headlines declare it daily:

• 2014 - Home Depot is hacked, losing an estimated 55 million credit cards to the cybercrime underground.
• 2013 - Russian Hackers steal 40 million credit cards from Target, resulting in approx $1 billion in losses to the company.
• 2012 - The Shamoon virus destroys nearly 30,000 Saudi Aramco Computers, temporarily shutting down one of the world’s largest corporations.
• 2011 - SONY data breach lost personal details and payment information for approximately 77 million customers, resulting in massive monetary loss and the temporary closure of the PlayStation Gaming Network.

The corporations victimized in these situations were unprepared to respond to the attacks causing delayed investigations and reduced information flow to decision-making executives.  Eventually, they contracted out the investigations to high-priced consultants, whose investigative results were often too little, too late.

IFCI-CCI’s mission is to provide our students the knowledge and skills necessary to respond to network attacks immediately, analyze the evidence, produce actionable cyber-intelligence, and implement it to shore up security vulnerabilities before they become massive breaches like those mentioned above.

There is a dearth of quality training in computer forensics, even less for hacker and malware focused investigations, and almost nothing that is available in a convenient online format that can be studied from the comfort of your own home, and fit to your own schedule.  IFCI fills this void by providing the finest cybercrime investigation training in the world, created and delivered by some of the world’s foremost experts in their field, and streamed directly to any Internet-connected device you choose to employ. 

No, while IFCI-CCI does teach hacker and malware investigations, it is based on first teaching solid computer forensic practices and procedures that are applicable to all types of cybercrime.  This course teaches and is equally applicable to all subfields of cybercrime investigations.

There are a number of computer forensic training and certification programs available on the market, however, IFCI-CCI stands alone because it was designed to teach the skills necessary to conduct modern cybercrime investigations against real-life criminals. It is based on real case examples and requires practical application of skills throughout a series of hands-on labs.

What differentiates IFCI-CCI?

1. Focus on network intrusion investigations
2. Introduction to malware analysis
3. Cutting-edge techniques such as volatile memory analysis
4. Entirely based on real-life cases and methodologies to respond to them
5. Taught and designed by a recognized expert in worldwide cybercrime investigation and computer forensics

Yes, IFCI has taught many students with no technical background who still achieved a high level of success in the IFCI-CCI course.  This is because this course begins at the most basic level of computer forensics, designed to welcome students who are new to the field to cybercrime investigations.  The course then reinforces the lecture and theory with labs that teach students how to utilize theory in real-life situations.  It is true that the IFCI-CCI course eventually teaches some of the most advanced and cutting edge investigative techniques used in the field today but each technique is introduced in a clear and easy-to-understand manner.  This approach ensures that the IFCI-CCI course is equally applicable to both brand new practitioners and veteran cybercrime investigators.

A primary tenant of the IFCI teaching pedagogy is that students cannot learn the highly technical practice of computer forensics, network intrusion, and malware analysis without intensive, hands-on experience.  Theory and academic knowledge are important but they are just a primer for real-life, practical experience. 

The IFCI Cybercrime Investigator course employs 15 different real-life analytical labs.  Each lab in this course is a step in the process of investigating a real life hacker attack on a victim computer infected with real-life malware.  The labs walk the student investigator through the process of identifying the malware, the attack vector, and understanding how the attacker conducted his evil activities on the victim computer.  The final labs teach cutting edge capabilities in the field of volatile memory analysis and dynamic analysis of the attacking malware. 

By the time the course is finished, the students have investigated an entire network intrusion, identified the attacker, the data breach, and analyzed the capability of the malware used in the attack.  IFCI teaches both academic knowledge and provides practical experience.  This is the only way to prepare students for the real world of Cybercrime investigation.

IFCI courses are designed around free tools that can be easily downloaded from the Internet.  All tools have been tested and vetted by IFCI and are verified to produce reliable and accurate results.  IFCI students can immediately put their training to use in their own investigations at no additional cost.  Purchase of additional profit-based forensic tools such as EnCase, FTK, or X-Ways may ease and speed forensic analysis and this is encouraged by IFCI.  However, for organizations where cost is a primary factor, the IFCI investigative methodology can be conducted at no additional cost.

All IFCI students will be immediately contacted by the instructor when they enroll in a new course.  This introductory email will serve as the first step in a mentorship relationship between the student and instructor that will last throughout the training program and often much longer into student’s careers.  Students are free to use the IFCI mentorship program as much or as little as they desire but many students find the individual attention they receive through the program to be the key to truly understanding the field of cybercrime investigation. IFCI students receive more than just technical understanding; they receive a partner to facilitate their individual comprehension of cybercrime investigation.

Every 6 months, small scale updates are pushed to the course.  This may include tool version updates, changes to laws, or slide/ lecture corrections.  Every 2 years, all courses are fully reviewed and updated versions are released.

Yes, IFCI training has been evaluated for content, video learning time, hands-on lab time and overall level of effort.  

Students who successfully complete the IFCI-500 Cybercrime Investigators course will be awarded 36 CPE's.

The current pricing for the IFCI-CCI course, including all digital evidence, forensic tools, labs and other teaching material is $300 US Dollars.

The current pricing for the IFCI Certified CyberCrime Investigator Professional certification exam and certificate is $99 US Dollars.