Friday, July 11, 2008

Tech sleuths in demand to track cyber trails

By Catherine Williams, Special to Mass High Tech

Neil Entwistle, convicted of murder two weeks ago, left a digital evidence trail that included searches for cheap flights to England and search terms that helped prosecutors seal the case accusing him of killing his wife and infant daughter.

Such digital forensic analysis technologies — for high- and low-profile criminal investigations alike —  are being used more and more by state prosecutors across New England to gather evidence by mining Internet searches, IP addresses, and text and instant messages. For New England companies such as Burlington-based Pixel Forensics Inc., the uptick in demand is keeping business buzzing.

Andrew Merlino, Pixel’s CEO and founder, said his company specializes in software to analyze digital video files and images. Fueling the market is the ubiquitous presence of cheap digital mobile devices and the swelling popularity of sites such as Facebook, Hulu and YouTube, he said.

“You have to believe it’s a good market to be in,” said Merlino, who noted that Pixel has bootstrapped enough funding to carry it through 2009.

Founded in 2007, Pixel employs five workers. Its software seeks similarities, frame by frame, across thousands of video files across multiple computers. Investigators use the technology to document connections among criminals, like drug dealers or terrorists, said Merlino.

Brian Carne, owner of DataInquiry LLC in Windham, N.H., said his company employs five workers trained to conduct criminal and private-sector cyber-investigations in sexual harassment, fraud, intellectual property and drug-trafficking cases. When he founded DataInquiry in 2002, Carne said he felt alone in the market. The company processed three cases every six months.

“It was sort of like a desert,” said Carne. The desert has bloomed, however, in recent years. In 2007, the company processed 3,700 hard drives and banked 90,000 miles of airline travel to and from clients, he said. The company serves law firms and posts less than $1 million in annual revenue, Carne said.

Language software developer Basis Technology Corp. of Cambridge is also in the forensics game. The company develops software for keyword searches in 16 languages, including Arabic and Japanese.

New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Lucy Carrillo said there was such a “big upswing” in the demand for digital forensics expertise that the position of cyber-crime prosecutor was created in 2007. And to the south, Connecticut formed its Computer Crime and Electronic Evidence Laboratory in 2006. Since it began the number of cases handled by that lab has risen by 24 percent.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said her plan to create a 3,000-square-foot, $650,000 computer forensics laboratory should be ready by the fall. Laboratory director David Papargiris, former member of the U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force, said the lab will have seven forensics workstations to extract evidence from laptops, cellular phones and GPS devices.

When asked why the advisory panel that crafted her cyber-crime initiative didn’t include industry experts, Coakley said she plans to include the private sector in the future to keep up with the fast pace of technology.

“Law enforcement has many strengths — being nimble is not among them, unfortunately. We’re doing our best to work with industry to catch up,” said Coakley.

 

Catherine Williams is a freelance writer in Boston.