According to recently released statistics from ICAC, an agency whose aim is to make the internet safer for children, only 2% of reported child protection cases are investigated in the United States each year. Often the media seize every opportunity to disparage forensics organisations, child protection charities and law enforcement agencies for not coming up with more effective solutions to these cases, but the reality is that the investigation of illicit image distribution is a wide-ranging and complex area, fraught with difficulties.
Digital forensics professionals will undoubtedly come across such cases as part of their general workload. Sometimes a case will begin with an investigator specifically looking for suspicious images, whilst at other times the illicit nature of the images will be discovered in the course of an unrelated process. Regardless of the initial push, however, it is undoubtedly one of the most taxing and time-consuming parts of the job…
