International Center for Digital Forensic Science has been established at SPC RAS. Scientists and experts of the Center will help representatives of law enforcement agencies and lawyers in Russia and other countries to solve crimes related to the digital technologies involvement including data theft and corruption, violation of the programs’ and devices’ functionality, illegal use of intellectual property.
"SPC RAS possesses quite profound professional skills in expertise and analysis of data related to cybercrime, therefore, representatives of domestic and foreign companies regularly contact us with a request to assist with the investigation of various incidents. Say, the attackers have stolen some important information. Lawyers, as a rule, work out legal aspects to submit a lawsuit and participate in court sessions, and we, in turn, restore the course of the crime logic and course in the light of IT technologies: how the criminals bypassed the security system, where from and how the attack was carried out, where to search for information, what to do in order to further protect the affected party. To execute the work of the type, we decided to initiate this new Center," says Andrey Chechulin, Head of the Center, Leading Researcher of the SPC RAS Laboratory of Computer Security Problems.
Besides the accepting and executing orders from various organizations to run expert assessments, the Center of Forensic Science will develop new methods of crimes’ investigation. This is absolutely necessary in order to keep abreast with cybercriminals constantly coming up with new methods to bypass digital security systems. Needless to mention, that the scientists of this Center will continuously devise new ways to automate the analysis of causes and consequences of cybercrime in order to reduce the expertise time and improve its quality.
"The Center’s organization has a network structure. So, it was established based on our laboratory, and when necessary, other SPC RAS units can join the projects with their absolutely unique experience, which can also be used at cybercrimes investigations. For example, in other laboratories there work specialists professionally engaged in the analysis of audio and video materials, as well as cyber - physical devices," explains Andrey Chechulin.
A technical committee was formed at SPC RAS to coordinate the activity of the International Center for Digital Forensic Science. It includes scientists and criminologists from Russia, France, Germany, Sweden and other countries. The Center is already doing a number of projects in the field of cybercrime research. For example, now the SPC RAS scientists are doing an expert examination of a case of information theft from a private company in the United States. The researchers will have to reconstruct the crime course; the results of this work will be used in court by the affected party.