Usually, when people get into trouble and know their phone and laptops will be seized by the police, the first instinct is to delete everything.
Some people will tell you that you are safe wiping your phone or laptop and deleting all its content.
This is however not the case as demonstrated by cybersecurity experts over the last couple of years.
With just Sh4 million shillings, law enforcement agencies can acquire a machine that can crack any phone and retrieve all its content – even that which is deleted.
The Israeli-made machine – Cellebrite Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) – is sold only to approved government and corporate organizations.
The machine can crack passwords and extract varying degrees of data from almost every smartphone on the market.
Photos, texts, locations and more can be extracted from the phone’s memory even if previously wiped.
A video by the BBC shows that this machine can extract all deleted call logs and place you and the people you talked to at the specific locations you were at.
Police authorities across the world, including Kenya, are now relying on such machines to extract information from suspects’ gadgets.
This practice, despite being criticised as an intrusion, has been credit for swift action on recent high profile crimes murders such as that of Sharon Otieno and Monica Kimani.
In the recent murder of Monica Kimani, police have used the need to do forensics on the suspects’ phones to have them detained pending investigations.
Investigators have used data from the prime suspect Joseph Irungu to place him at the scene of the crime in Kilimani even though his phone is said to have been off
In the Sharon case, the investigators are also using phone data to link the suspects who include Migori Governor Okoth Obado to the crime.
Extraction of cyber-based information has put suspects at crime scenes and has also been used to identify their suspected accomplices.
If police call you today and ask you to present yourself to a certain station and you say you are out of town, it takes a few clicks for them to ascertain the truth of this.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations is heavily relying on technology to crack crimes in the country with more officers being trained on how to do it.
The Cyber Crime Unit has been busy over the last couple of years analysing data from phones seized from suspects especially in terror-related cases.
These investigations are mainly aimed at establishing the movement of suspects and unearthing possible accomplices and associates that they could have.
At the DCI headquarters, investigators can now do forensic examination of computers and mobile phones, uncovering of passwords and the analysis of deleted and active files.
They are also able to locate and analyse data in ambient data sources, recover deleted or encrypted data/emails, SMS, video and Internet sites.
In addition, they are doing forensic sim card analysis and extraction of data from mobile phones.
If need be, the DCI can produce expert forensic evidence in court in the cases that they are handling.
