Police cyber lab outsource expert assistance for want of equipment

The cyber lab, which had spent several lakhs of rupees to acquire tools for disc forensics, mobile forensic tool kits and cyber investigation tool kits, has now become almost defunct as the authorities have failed to renew the licences of the purchased products by paying licence fees.

Sources in the cybercrime wing told DTNext that practically, the lab has no tools to retrieve deleted data from computers and mobile phones. “We had purchased sophisticated tools to handle such cases. However, these tools have now become useless as no further fund allocation was made to renew the licences and to update the products,” a cybercrime wing official disclosed. When the cybercrime lab was upgraded and commissioned in August 2009, the city police had spent more than Rs. 70 lakh to purchase some essential ‘interception’ and ‘retrieval’ tools. Further, purchases were also made as per the directions of cybercrime experts and the unit had been functioning with great efficacy. However, when the licences of the products expired, the authorities failed to provide additional funds to update the tools and renew the licences. 

When it was upgraded last, the Chennai city cyber lab was hailed as one of the most sophisticated in the country. The lab then had 68 forensic tools _ 25 relating to software and 43 to hardware _ and had an external hard disc with a 320 gigabytes storage capacity. “Now, we depend on some private experts to retrieve deleted data. Some private players have invested crores of rupees and have highly trained specialists in handling such cases. They usually handle only big cases of corporates by taking hefty fees. However, we manage to get some work done from them using our personal influence with them,” another official said. The state forensic lab at Foreshore Estate also has a cyber lab where such tools are available. 

However, the process for retrieving cyber evidence from this lab is cumbersome. As per the legal procedure, forensic lab can conduct a test only based on a direction from the court or based on an FIR registered for investigation. 

“We cannot approach them during preliminary investigation. The primary evidences have to be collected by us before filing an FIR and then seek the assistance of the forensic lab. The cyber lab we had at our disposal helped us in cracking cases better and faster. But now the systems have become useless,” another official added. The cybercrime cell of CCB is primarily handling all types of complaints including threat emails, phishing, copyright infringement, sex related offences on cyber arena, obscene SMS texts, online fraud, objectionable content on social media, software piracy, spoofing, hacking and virus dissemination.