Cellebrite Strengthens Fight to Save Exploited Children

For all their benefits, always on, connected devices and networks have created channels for predators to exploit children and proliferate explicit material. Nearly every week, the media reports on yet another tragic victim of child sexual exploitation (CSE) and abuse. The sheer number of both photos and videos seized and reviewed annually is staggering. In a 2016 Report by the US Department of Justice, The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) estimated that more than 26 million sexual abuse images
and videos were reviewed by their analysts in 2015 alone. That number continues to climb exponentially each year, challenging law enforcement agencies around the globe.

“When I started in forensics, the majority of devices we seized were desktops and laptops,” said Randy Kyburz, Certified Digital Forensic Examiner with the Seattle Police Internet Crimes Against Children Unit. “When we did have cellphones to examine, they were largely ‘dumb.’ Years ago, we’d walk out of a crime scene with maybe one of each. Today, we often collect 30+ devices at a scene, with smart phones making up about 40 percent of total devices recovered.”

Traditional digital forensic workflows, combined with sentencing guidelines and the sheer volume of offenders, have created an epidemic where child victims are often undetected and undiscovered, and the crimes committed against them are never investigated. The failure of this detection enables the continued access to and abuse of these children.

The new definition of slavery

In 2016, more than 40 million people were estimated to be victims of modern slavery, according to the findings of a new report by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation.
One in four people were children, with women and girls accounting for 71 percent of slavery victims – a staggering 99 percent of those define the commercial sex industry.

An urgent and global call of duty

Thanks to ubiquitous connectivity, offenders have virtually unlimited access to unsuspecting children and lurid content. An FBI investigation of a single website hosted on Tor, the anonymous internet network, had approximately 200,000 registered users with 100,000 individuals accessing the site during a 12-day period1. Individual offenders often possess massive collections of terabytes or even petabytes of data on multiple devices.

When tens of thousands of images of child abuse material are seized by law enforcement, many of those photos or videos are destined to be left on devices, in the cloud or in evidence lockers. This results in there not being a reliable way to extract, parse and identify known and unknown victims. To change that paradigm, Cellebrite continues to invest significantly to unlock, access and analyze this data quickly and defensibly.

The Cellebrite Analytics Series provides powerful options for correlating and analyzing files from various computer, social media, cloud, mobile, telco and other digital sources. Full integration with Project VIC, the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) and other defined hash value databases significantly reduces manual analysis efforts, not to mention the psychological stress of investigators reviewing sensitive material.

“Cellebrite has a large digital forensics solution footprint worldwide,” says Richard Brown, Project VIC Coordinator for the United States and manager for the National Association to Protect Children (Protect.org). “We know handset computers – smart phones – will be replacing most consumer desktops in the near future. Cellebrite’s longstanding reputation for innovation and its comprehensive suite of digital forensic investigative tools allow us to partner and test new ideas and methods to combat child exploitation and human trafficking. We are excited to explore new opportunities in the areas of machine learning and object recognition together with Cellebrite. This cooperation will ultimately better position investigators to deal with massive amounts of data they must go through in these modern-day investigations that seek to identify and extract these children out of harm’s way.”

Optimizing shared resources and workflows

The goal is steadfast. Identify and save more exploited children – quickly. Cellebrite has made it its mission to fight child exploitation and put the power back in the hands of those dedicated to protecting children around the world. Cellebrite’s Analytics Series empowers forensics practitioners, investigators and analysts to manage efficiently the growing volume of evidential data and reduce case cycle times.

All case stakeholders can access forensics artifacts and collaborate in real time. Unique machine learning algorithms accelerate time to evidence. The power of the Analytics solution lies not only in the ability to correlate and review actionable insights across all data sources, but also to help quickly find evidence when investigators don’t know what they are looking for: what people are talking about, languages they are using, locations they’ve frequented, etc.

Powerful on-scene capabilities

Empowering law enforcement legally, reliably and forensically to extract digital data on the scene for immediate decision making is a critical step in the fight to save children from further harm.

“Cellebrite has a deep commitment to the global law enforcement community combatting child luring, exploitation and trafficking crimes,” said Brown. “Now that Cellebrite is working close with Project VIC, we see many opportunities in the future to build even tighter integrations on workflows that save investigators time and exposure. The new trend is to automate many of the manual processes so that investigators can concentrate on results.”

According to Kyburz, “Cellebrite remains our primary digital forensics solution – in the field and in the lab – for both physical and advanced logical extractions and analysis. It comes in handy, a one-stop solution, for quickly reviewing and tagging ICAC material. This can then determine if the material is known by Project VIC or not, at the scene, and then get back to investigators, so the data can inform their next steps.”

Arnold Guerin, a police officer and technology specialist with the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, managed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, adds that a mobile data extraction and analysis solution for the field allows first responders on a scene to access critical data right away so they can act.

“Children involved in these cases have negative thoughts about what they’ve done and have been groomed to believe they will get in trouble or arrested if they tell officers anything,” said Guerin. “Putting a child’s mind at ease that they did nothing wrong is very important to gain access to their devices and the evidence they contain.”

A collective, collaborative fight to serve and protect

Preventing child exploitation takes collaboration, real-time information and an ongoing commitment to identify every victim quickly and get criminals – and the content they produce and share – off the streets. With more and more children using mobile devices – both phones and tablets – at an earlier age, the risks are only getting bigger.

Due to the amount of data being created, there’s also a huge migration toward mobile apps leveraging cloud storage. “Today, your evidence may not lie in the country you live in, so preserving evidence on phones and self-generated content is incredibly important,” said Guerin. “It’s an imperfect scenario that can lead to tragic circumstances. Finding new victims is a driving focus and police and a growing list of partners have allowed us all to make significant progress.”

Guerin implemented Project VIC in Canada with a different hash database, but relying on the same standards and data model. He commends Cellebrite for taking the time to work with global agencies to really nail down the requirements before bringing a robust and fully integrated solution to market.

“Cellebrite did more than import hashes into its solution,” stressed Guerin. “They created other key meta data related to both identified and unidentified series as well and continue to heavily invest resources against our most pressing challenge – gaining access to digital device data. That is their sweet spot and other vendors rely on that as well.”

Protecting the innocent

What all global agencies have in common – as well as the growing ecosystem of technology vendors – is the strength of a shared goal. To find and protect exploited children.

“I get asked all the time how I can do this job,” said Guerin. “It’s the mission that makes the motivation clear. I think I have the best job in the world – to find and rescue kids – because I have the power to do it.”

Brown concurs. “Project VIC’s goal is to break down the walls and the days of isolated proprietary data and create an environment where any tool can be picked up to work on case data produced by any other tool in the Project VIC ecosystem. This is our international message to industry in this crime set. Project VIC often spreads this word through training with other countries alongside the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC).”

A common goal unites everyone committed to this mission. As ICMEC eloquently states: One child is one too many. Every single child deserves to grow up free from abduction, sexual abuse and exploitation. We are committed to building a safer world for our children by convening partners, advocating for improved protections and providing the necessary tools and training to those on the front lines.

For more information on Cellebrite and its Analytics Series, visit www.cellebrite.com