Belkasoft Helps Croatian Police Solve International Case of Child Abuse
Belkasoft Evidence Center, a digital forensic investigation software, was used by Croatian Police to prosecute an international case involving exploitation of children for pornography. During this case, Croatian Police used Belkasoft's product to extract and analyze information from suspect's computers, memory dumps and hard drive images. A detailed case study was made available by the police.
"We are proud and excited to see how our product helps law enforcement officials solve dangerous crimes", says Yuri Gubanov, Belkasoft CEO. "Stopping child abuse is one of the major achievements made possible with Belkasoft Evidence Center".
Solving the Crime
In an official letter received from Republic of Croatia Ministry of Interior Police Administration Bjelovarsko-bilogorska, Belkasoft was presented a Case Study of criminal investigation performed by the Criminal Police Department of Bjelovar, Croatia. Code named "PHOTOMODELL", the case (Case Number 511-02-11/1-V-K-9/14 GN/IKC, Bjelovar, 23.04.2014) investigated a case of child pornography.
According to the report, during February 2014 police officers of the Ministry of Interior of Republic of Croatia, Police Administration Bjelovarsko-bilogorska, Criminal Police Department in Bjelovar carried out a criminal investigation under code name "PHOTOMODELL". During this case, the police' goal was to collect evidence and identify person(s) who committed the crime according to the Croatian Criminal Code, article 16: "Exploitation of children for pornography".
During this investigation, police officers carried out 9 searches of residence, cars and suspects, and obtained 5 computers belonging to one suspect. While analyzing these computers, the police acquired memory dumps and hard drive images from all 5 PCs. The acquired images and memory dumps were processed with Belkasoft Evidence Center. The tool returned a substantial amount of data that the police were able to use during the investigation. Some parts of that data were also used as court evidence.
The tool helped the police obtain information regarding the suspect's use of social media, instant messengers, web history data, etc. The police used data carving to extract deleted data and acquire destroyed evidence. A report of more than 450 pages was produced and forwarded to the Public prosecutor in Bjelovar.
At the end of the day, with the use of Belkasoft Evidence Center, the police were able to collect evidence referring to 13 cases of "Exploitation of children for pornography" according to the article 163 of the Croatian Criminal Code and one case of "Unauthorized use of personal data" according to the article 146 of the Croatian Criminal Code. For all of the 14 cases, Police Administration Bjelovarsko-bilogorska submitted a criminal report against one person to the Public prosecutor in Bjelovar.
In addition, Belkasoft Evidence Center revealed information leading the police to other possible cases of "Exploitation of children for pornography" according to the article 163 of the Croatian Criminal Code where victims were located in the Republic of Serbia. The evidence was forwarded to corresponding foreign law enforcement agencies.
Belkasoft Evidence Center Helps Solve Crime
Belkasoft Evidence Center can automatically locate, process and analyze volatile evidence stored in the computer's RAM, identify encrypted files, employ carving to recover Internet chat logs, Web browsing history and email communications including information stored in digital pictures and videos. The ability to process office documents in a wide range of formats enables investigators to perform near-instant full-text search among all the documents discovered on the suspect's PC.
Low-level access to hard disk and system structures means that even data that's been deleted by the suspect cannot escape from investigators. Supporting Windows, Unix/Linux, Android, macOS, and other file systems, natively mounting images created in E01, DD, UFED and chip-off binary dumps, FTK images, mobile phones and many popular virtual machines without using these or any third-party tools, Belkasoft Evidence Center can collect more evidence than any single competing tool in its class.
Automated Detection of Pornographic Content in Videos and Still Images
One of the key features of Belkasoft Evidence Center is the ability to analyze multimedia content such as videos and still images, searching suspect computers for signs of illicit contents. Automated pornography detection helps quickly detect and locate illicit material in fully automated mode.
The detection of pornographic content makes use of neural networks in order to automatically discover matching content in still images and key frames extracted from video files. The neural network algorithms used in Belkasoft Evidence Center represent today's state of art, which allows a certain level of false positive and false negative detections.
To help investigators detect more suspicious images, the tool assigns images and key frames numeric values representing the probability of an image to contain illicit content. Images can be sorted by that probability to allow highly suspicious images appear first on the list. Multiple videostreams, used by criminals to hide illicit video footage, can be easily detected by the product.
Learn more about Belkasoft Evidence Center X.