Police work is mostly about solving cases, and this is not a trivial task. Gathering clues and hints is important to achieve the desired outcome. As everyone today has a mobile device with them wherever they go, and these devices are capturing a lot of information (calls, chats, locations, pictures, contacts), leveraging this data for investigation is just common logic.
Researchers conducted on investigation process proved that evidence or clues that are gathered within the first 48 hours are imperative to solving cases, and the statistics shows that when there is no real direction the chances to ever solve the case decreases by 50 percent.So the need for speed is clear, and providing actionable data extracted from mobile devices is a necessity. How can this be done? Mobile forensic examiners’ skill sets are developed over years in order to overcome different technical challenges of obtaining forensically sound evidence. How can we speed the process and move it from the forensic labs, where we have the experts, to the field where we have excellent investigators whom ar not experts in mobile forensics?
This is the exact challenge we faced at Cellebrite when we started planning and designing our UFED InField solution. We have consulted with many of our customers (both digital forensic experts and police investigators), and together we defined the criteria and needs of users for field mobile extraction. There were three main obstacles we needed to address:
1. Extraction duration – it must be quick and effective, as in the field there is no time for long process.
2. Simplicity – The users are not technical nor forensic experts, and therefore the flow should be as simple as possible.
3. Deployment management – When you have a wide deployment of devices across the country to enable investigative teams to perform mobile extraction quickly, you must have a tool to manage the deployment and set flows per the need on the agency.
With new release of UFED InField 5.2, we kept the above three challenges as part of our product design guidelines, and indeed, based on the feedback from our beta customers, we gained a lot of progress.
Meeting all the needs for field forensics is a journey, and together with our customers will continue to research and develop new capabilities to make the experience simplified and efficient as possible.
Watch the video below to learn about Cellebrite’s enhanced UFED InField solution:
