The conference is taking place in the Gold Coast, and has immediately followed the AusCERT security conference, which ended yesterday.
The head of the high-tech crime unit of the AFP, Alastair MacGibbon, says that hosting the conference after the AusCERT event has helped to attract good speakers and save money.
"We were taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people were already in town," he told ZDNet Australia. "We have some experts like [Linux security specialist] Thomas Rude... some of the AusCERT speakers are staying on".
Police from most, if not all, Australian jurisdictions are in attendance, as are the Netherlands police, several Asian policing bodies, and Australian commonwealth agencies such as the Defence Signals Directorate's computer network vulnerability team.
Although the conference will focus on both forensics and investigations, it's the investigative side that is most interesting to the AFP.
"We're looking at how you investigate a live matter and how we can track offenders," MacGibbon said. "We're also asking people to tell us about the psychology behind some of the crimes we'll be looking at".
MacGibbon has been given the job of heading up the Australian high tech crime centre, a new group that will co-ordinate cyber crime fighting efforts between various state and Commonwealth agencies. However he couldn't give a concrete timeline for its launch.
"The high tech crime centre will be formed at a later date," he said. "It's not an easy task, might I add... to construct a national investigative unit".
MacGibbon can't say which Commonwealth agencies will be involved, because he hasn't yet "formally approached them".
"We see a logical symmetry between what we're doing and what a lot of agencies are doing," he said.
Earlier reports that the centre's budget was in the vicinity of AU$20 million per annum are overstated, MacGibbon said.
"I would love it to be [AU$20million]," he said. "It's not correct... I don't know how they arrived at that figure".
