INSPECTr

Cybercrime is the use of technology and the internet to commit illegal acts and exploit businesses, communities and individuals.

The types of cybercrime being perpetrated are diverse, including extortion, child sexual exploitation, trade in illicit goods, politically motivated attacks, attacks against critical infrastructure and cyber terrorism.

Cyber criminals leave a cyber trail that can be used to track them down. However, it is often very difficult for law enforcement officers to pull together all of the disparate data sources in order to perform comprehensive, coherent analysis.

The environment of super-fast communications and massive volumes of data means the challenge of acquiring and analysing digital evidence is increasingly difficult and extremely time consuming.

Combatting cybercrime:

How can law enforcement agencies process digital evidence more efficiently to combat cybercrime?

The INSPECTr project will develop a platform for gathering, analysing and presenting key data with increased levels of automatisation, to improve the digital forensic capabilities of European law enforcement agencies.

The INSPECTr platform will improve knowledge discovery and facilitate speedier exchange of information using:

• Big data analytics: Analytics tools applied to the data will allow the investigators to discover useful information; for example, time filtering will allow investigators to compare activity on various devices during a given time period
• Cognitive machine learning: Cognitive Computing and Natural Language Processing tools will support the extraction of data from social media, internet/dark-web websites, investigative documents, legislation and other sources of unstructured or prose-based data sources
• Blockchain: Evidence collection protocols will be stored as a blockchain to ensure the integrity of the data

Trilateral assesses the ethical, legal and social issues that need to be considered in the development of a shared intelligence platform.

Trilateral considers potential risks associated with technological development involving digital forensics, the measures needed to respect privacy, ethical and social considerations to avoid unwanted negative impact to fundamental rights.

Trilateral engages Living Labs members, law enforcement agencies, and technology developers to validate the INSPECTr platform following its implementation.

Trilateral will perform quality assurance regarding the efficiency and efficacy of the INSPECTr platform, gathering feedback from end users to ensure the final platform facilitates the ingestion and homogenisation of data, allowing for the interoperability between outputs from multiple data formats.

Following the creation of the INSPECTr platform, INSPECTr generates policy recommendations to improve the digital and forensic capabilities of law enforcement agencies and reduce the complexity and cost of cross-border collaborations.

For more information and updates visit the project website.

Trilateral’s technical team contributes to the Law Enforcement Agencies’ (LEAs) capacity building programme by creating an innovative open-source tool for visualisation of electronic evidence. The tool will facilitate the management and enhance the understanding of a wide range of binary files commonly found in digital investigations and will include a user interface through which trainees can explore the structure of these files and find hidden pieces of information in them.