A day at the Netherlands Forensic Institute
Last week as part of WICCA, I spent a few hours at the Netherlands Forensic Institute(NFI), meeting two amazing NFI women, Angela and Ginger.
Angela works with NFI as an IT Security Officer, spreading the Security awareness within the teams. That's when she is not assessing the risks in the in-house developed software or monitoring various security-related logs. Angela explained in her presentation that NFI contributes to the investigations by maintaining a secured DNA portal for national and international agencies.
DNA Portal is a system that allows investigators from a few external laboratories (contractors) to perform searches in the DNA Database. These are located in the Netherlands. The employees from the external labs should be able to upload a DNA profile and then receive the results back from the database via DNA Portal. The challenging processes include an end to end support, right from extracting the DNA from evidence to maintaining a watertight database. This also includes providing secure and controlled access to external locations and collaborations with the other international agencies.
Angela lights up when talking about the challenges involved in a threat assessment that she must perform for various in house products, like the DNA portal.
As an example, a detailed step by step account was given for the threat assessment performed before extending the access to the Maastricht office.
The integrity of the information is assessed to be of utmost value in the DNA portal's extended access.
In the second part, Ginger who is a digital forensics investigator with the NFI gave an overview of the functional organization and various forensic investigation possibilities within the NFI. Delving deeper into a few sample case studies, Ginger showed how the digital tracing facilitates the investigation. Two major sources of investigation requests were laid out and Ginger could not help hide how she likes some kind investigations better than the others. ??
The sheer amount of complexity of evidence material to be processed against diverse digital databases led to the development of Hansken, the NFI's advanced DFaaS (Digital Forensics as a Service) platform. A major highlight of the day was that the attendees got a firsthand experience of exploring the Hansken for a sample investigation case involving a car, a laptop, a phone and a USB device. It was amazing how with a little logical understanding of using metadata, correlations and search functions, the platform makes the search possible. Though it is doubtful that the real-life cases these two NFI women come across at work are as straight forward as they laid it out in the test case. The session overall was very well organized. Both logistically and in terms of the content that was put together, thoughtfully.