JOIN USA full-fledged Cyber Forensics Section at the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Madiwala in the City will save valuable time for investigating officers in getting reports on digital evidence.
Till now, though the State police had the cyber laboratory to probe digital evidence, they had to wait for the report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Hyderabad, for admissibility under the Evidence Act in the court of law.
Home Minister K J George inaugurated the Cyber Forensics Centre on Wednesday.
The centre has been developed by the State police on a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, at a cost of Rs 1.30 crore.
FSL Director and Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) B Dayanand said cyber forensics had modern gadgets required for all types of digital evidence analysis.
“The MoU includes providing designing, instrumentation, infrastructure and training. Forensic examination, reporting process uncovers digital evidence of hidden data through established scientific methods. The evidence thus analysed in our own forensics section will enable police agencies to adduce digital evidence in the court of law,” Dayanand said, adding that five expert staff of the FSL were undergoing three-month training at C-DAC.
He said the C-DAC experts would also be stationed at FSL Madiwala for six months till the State experts are trained to handle the softwares.
A senior official said the tools at the forensics section also include portable workstations for the staff to carry for crime-scene management.
“These days, every crime involves electronic gadgets, especially mobile phones and laptops. The tools and softwares at the centre will be used for imaging the suspected media at the crime scene.
There are high-capacity data-transfer tools, softwares, especially designed for analysis of Chinese-make phones, tools for recovering passwords using brute force, dictionary attacks, tools for hashing the suspected drive and also to clone the drive. Deleted files, network analysis can be carried out with the softwares set up at the centre,” an official said.
Dayanand said one expert staff at the centre had already handled and analysed digital evidence in 65 cases so far.
“The National Crime Record Bureau report states that Maharashtra (681), Karnataka (513 cases), Uttar Pradesh (372 cases) and Kerala (349 cases) had reported high incidence of cyber crime and accounted for more than half of the cases (51.5 per cent) during the year 2013.
One forensic expert, Dr Kumuda Rani, was trained in the computer forensic field at C-DAC. The centre will have three work units headed by assistant directors and scientific officers,” Dayanand said.