Police Service has no digital forensic laboratory

It has emerged that the Ghana Police Service does not have a digital forensic laboratory that will be used for forensic examinations on exhibits retrieved in the course of investigations.

The absence of the facility has deprived the Police Service, the ability to properly preserve volatile digital evidence, according to the Cybercrime Unit (CU) of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

In a correspondence with the GRAPHIC BUSINESS, the unit said the most important goal of a forensic expert was to maintain and preserve the original media and data but the absence of the laboratory had rendered the unit inadequate in discharging such duties.

“This involves making a forensic image or forensic copy of the original media and conducting the analysis on the copy.

“If the evidence is not kept properly in a forensically sound environment, then both the media and data could be corrupted,” a statement from the unit said.

Chief purpose

The CU, which is an arm of the CID of the Police Service, was established in September 2015 as a specialised unit to fight against cybercrimes in the country.

As a result, the unit has since its establishment become the leader in the fight against cybercrimes across the country since such offences were rife in the past few years.

Although presently the unit conducts examination of digital systems and indulges in the extraction of digital evidence from digital devices, its work has been hampered by the lack of the needed facilities to front the fight against cybercrimes which keeps getting sophisticated by the day.

The CU also assists other units of the Police Service in the examination and extraction of digital evidence despite its inability to conduct such studies.

Fraud tops all

According to the Cybercrime Unit, about 82 per cent of the cases reported to the unit were related to fraud.

The victims, in most of the cases, were defrauded through romance, investment, advanced fee payment, email compromise, identity theft, mobile money, social media impersonation and Automated Teller Machine (ATM) fraud, among others.

The amount lost to fraud or stolen via the cyberspace stood at US$35 million in 2016 but the figure increased to US$69.5 million in 2017, an almost 100 per cent increment.

The unit also projected that victims of the various cyber-related crimes in the country could mislay some US$120 million to scammers this year if the necessary actions were not taken to distract the activities of fraudsters.

Capacity

Presently, the unit said it had successfully trained some 25 personnel on the use of the Linux application, which was used in the investigation of cyber-related crimes as an open source tool for forensic examinations.

The trained personnel, according to the unit, were ready to commence work once a digital forensic laboratory was established to conduct all the digital forensic examinations of exhibits across the country.

Beyond the investigations, the CU is also responsible for sensitising the general public to cybercrimes and its related activities.